Ms technology vocabulary USB flash drive
Sean Yuan
January 2009
Computer 7-8
USB Flash Drive
The USB Flash Drive is essentially a flash memory storage device equipped with a USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface. These flash drives are usually removable and compact in size. Storage size ranges from 64MB to 256GB. USB flash drives are much more convenient than floppy discs because of their portable storage, compact shape,very light weight, faster operation, tougher design, and larger memory capacity. Also, the decline of floppy disc drives are apparent in the increase of USB ports in almost all computers that you see. A small printed circuit board protected within a casing is all that a USB fundamentally is. The USB connector is usually covered somehow although they are not liable to be damaged without. Trek Technology and IBM started selling the first USB flash drives in 2000. Common names then were the “ThumbDrive” and the “DiskOnKey”. IBM’s first “DiskOnKey” came with a storage capacity of 8MB. However small this may seem, it was 5 times the storage range of the commonly used floppy disks at the time. As of 2010, large capacity USB drives can carry as much as 256 gigabytes of read and writable data.
