The USB Flash Drive

The USB Flash drive is touted as being superior to other portable storage media of the CD, DVD and floppy disks. It packs great storage space, is immune to various data loss scenarios and is magnetic resistant. It can and is used for a variety of purposes by personal users and commercial enterprises.

USB flash drives are NAND-type flash memory data storage devices integrated with a USB (universal serial bus) interface. They are typically small, lightweight, removable and rewritable. They are compact, faster with capacity to hold more data. The USB drive is reliable due to lack of moving parts. They have a durable design, which guards it against mechanical and hardware corruption. These types of drives use the USB mass storage standard supported by modern operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and UNIX.

A flash drive usually consists of a small printed circuit board in a plastic or metal casing. The USB connector protrudes from this protection covered by a removable cap. Most flash drives use a standard type-A USB connection allowing them to be connected directly to a port on a personal computer. In order to access the data stored in a flash drive, the drive ought to be connected to a computer. This can be done either by plugging it into a USB host controller built into the computer or into a USB hub. Flash drives can be declared active only when plugged into a USB connection drawing all necessary power from the supply provided by that connection. However, high-speed flash drives require more power than the limited amount provided by a bus-powered USB hub.

There are four parts to a flash drive:

• Male type-A USB connector which provides an interface to the host computer.


• USB mass storage controller that implements the USB host controller and provides a linear interface to block-oriented serial flash devices while hiding the complexities of block-orientation, block erasure. It also wears levelling and balancing. The controller contains a small RISC microprocessor and a small amount of on-chip ROM and RAM.


• NAND flash memory chip that stores data. NAND flash is typically also used in digital cameras.


• Crystal oscillator, which produces the device's main 12 MHz, clock signal controlling the device's data output through a phase-locked loop.

Benefits of the USB Flash Drive

Flash drives are described as being impervious to scratches and dust. This is in stark comparison to the DVD and other storage media, which tend to fall prey to firmware corruption due to dust and pushes. Some flash drives can retain their memory after being submerged in water including a machine wash. The USB flash drive boasts of a durable solid-state design which is capable of surviving casual abuse. This makes them ideal for transporting personal data or work files from one location to another. The ubiquity of USB support on modern computers indicates such a drive has the capacity to function optimally in most places.

Flash drives are dense form of storage. Even the cheapest USB flash drive has the capacity to store dozens of floppy disks worth of data. Many flash drives can hold more data than a DVD i.e. 700 MB. Despite their small size, they have a tremendous capacity to encrypt the saved data to store it without any glitches.

Flash drives implement the USB mass storage device class. This actually enables most modern operating systems to read and write to flash drives without any additional device drivers. The flash drives are designed as a simple block-structured logical unit to the host operating system. The flash drive structure hides the individual complex implementation details of the various underlying flash memory devices. This in turn enables the operating system to use whatever type of file system or block addressing scheme it wants.

Diverse Uses of the USB Flash Drive

System Administration: Flash drives are used for system maintenance, troubleshooting, and recovery.
Computer Repair: Flash drives are used transfer recovery and as antivirus software to infected PCs.
Application Carriers: Flash drives are used to carry applications that run on the host computer without requiring installation. Air WRX is an application framework that runs from a flash drive turning its PC host and other nearby PCs into a multi-screen, web-like work environment. Pocket SAN is a portable iSCSI framework that runs from a flash drive and turns its PC host into a full-featured SAN appliance. The Mozilla Firefox browser has a configuration for flash drives.
To Boot Operating Systems: USB flash drives are used to launch operating systems from a bootable drive. This use is known as a LiveUSB.
Personal Data Transport: The most common use of flash drives is to transport and store personal files such as documents, pictures and video. Individuals also store medical alert information on MedicTag flash drives for use in emergencies and for disaster preparation.