USB Flash Drives – An Efficacious Plug-and-play Portable Storage Device
USB flash drives are a popular data storage device that includes flash memory. It is very portable and is much smaller than an optical disc, weighing only about 30 grams. They were designed by combining several technologies such as the EPROM and EEPROM technologies. Due to advancements in microprocessor technology, the USB flash drive was made possible at lower cost and smaller size. On the market today, USB flash drives are available at up to 256 gigabytes worth of memory. At the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, a one terabyte drive was introduced to the public, the largest capacity USB flash drive created to date, with capacities of up to 2 terabytes planned in the near future. In the past, floppy disks and CD-ROMs were used to store and transfer data files. Desktop and laptop computers supported floppy disks and CDs up until 2005 when USB flash drives took over the dominant storage device on the market. Today, floppy disk drives are no longer in use because of their low capacity compared to USB flash drives. These products are now the standard on the market and are used in systems including OS X, Linux, and Windows. They can also be read by Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, DVD players, tablet computers, and other handheld devices. Flash drives are composed of small printed circuit boards and a USB connector, which is electrically insulated and protected. They also usually use a standard type-A USB connection, NAND flash memory chips, and a crystal oscillator. USB flash drives were initially marketed for commercial use in 2000 by Trek Technology and IBM at a storage capacity of 8 MB, which was already 5 times more than what floppy disks could hold. In the same year, Lexar then introduced the Compact Flash card with a USB connection.