All About Flash Drives

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by: EDGETechCorp
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Word Count: 349
Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 Time: 6:32 AM
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When personal computers first went mainstream back in the mid 1990's, the external storage medium of choice was the 3.5 inch floppy drive. Unfortunately floppy's were slow and bulky and their standard storage of 1.44 megabytes was quickly outstripped by technological advancements. In recent years most computer manufacturers have ceased including floppy drives in their product lines altogether. While floppy's are still widely used in certain professions such as the music and theater industry for lighting consoles and drum machines their use is rapidly declining.

Next came the compact disk or CD as a medium for mass external storage. CD-ROM's are still quite widely used for file back up and the burning of mp3 music files. CD's however are vulnerable to scratches and exposure to other elements, even more so than floppy disks. They are also much bulkier than their predecessor although one CD-ROM can hold as much as 800 megabytes of information. A CD-ROM can also be used to flash bios on a computer in the absence of a floppy drive.

USB flash drives are small, portable flash memory data storage devices married with an integrated universal serial bus (USB) 1.1 or 2.0 interface. These devices are removable, rewritable and, as the name implies, about the same size as your thumb. Typically they are protected by being either retractable or having a plastic cap and are surrounded by a hard plastic enclosure. This protects them from damage by careless users as well as from the natural elements. In fact there are many stories of thumb drives forgotten in pockets and run through both washer and dryer with no data loss, some several times, all without any apparent ill effects.

USB flash drives have increased in storage capacity at a remarkable rate, drives can now be found that contain 256 GB of storage space. This is the same size as what was considered a rather roomy internal hard drive just a few years ago. And the price per megabyte is expected to decrease as the technology matures. Some USB flash drives allow up to one million rewrites and have a ten year data retention expectancy.

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Edgetechcorp.com is a leading supplier of Computer Memory Upgrades, Flash Cards, Flash Drives, External Hard Drives, and other experience-enhancing technology solutions.