The USB Flash Drive has come along a few years back and rendered the Floppy Disk virtually extinct. The Floppy disk was a horrible piece of work: always letting you down when you could least afford it; corrupting your work the day before a deadline; spreading viruses like the plague; running out of space; generally being annoying and slow; the list could go on. The point is the arrival of the USB flash drive thankfully got rid of all this and we should be very grateful.
What is a flash drive?
USB flash drives are small devices that can easily be used to carry data, where ever you go. A flash drive has a USB plug which means you can plug it into any PC or laptop and the drive will be picked up as if you put a DVD into the drive. Flash drives are solid state drives, this means they have no moving parts like DVD drives or hard drives. That makes them a lot less prone to breaking, if for instance you drop one. Instead of electromagnetically storing data like a hard drive, flash drives use semi-conductors to store data.
If you are looking for the best flash drive, you need to consider capacity and function, speed, price, design, extra features, and sturdiness. Metal encased flash drives may cost more than its plastic encased ones but are more sturdy. Other flash drives also have pre-added extra functions for MP3 listening or even FM tuning, while others offer useful applications such as e-mail browsing and file synchronization. Because flash drives are used to connect with a lot of computers, some of them now come with password protection. Recently bootable flash drives have also entered the market, they are great for testing broken PCs.
Capacity
Flash drives use to hold a maximum of 1 Gig a couple of years ago. Today a bottom of the line model holds 2 Gig and a top of the line one holds 32 Gig. So the technology has improved greatly in a very short time. I would say the most flash drives sold to day are of the 8 Gig type.
Speed
The current generation of USB flash drives use USB 2.0 which means they are much faster than the older USB drives. There are some super high speed drives entering the market at the moment. Generally USB flash drives get all their power from the host connection. But these high speed USB drives may require more power than provided by the bus powered USB plug.
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