USB Drives Heat up the Data Storage Scene

by: jameswalsh
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Toyota recently promoted its 2006 Lexus RX 350 sports utility vehicle in the U.S. by mass mailing, not glossy brochures crammed into bulky envelopes, but 21,000 USB Flash Drives smaller than cigarette lighters.

Nancy Glover, a saleswoman who’s always on the go says that she hates to lug her laptop around, so now she carries her laptop around in a tiny USB Drive.

Flash drives are stealing the show at conventions and trade shows. This is mainly because of their increasing omnipresence and affordability. About 30 million flash drives were sold worldwide last year.

Frank Beeck of Siemens Transportation Systems no longer weighs himself down with printed materials for his industry exhibits.

Instead, he stores his information on 64-megabyte flash drives. He says he prefers flash drives because, if necessary, he can quickly reload them with updated info. He adds that his flash drives proved so popular at a recent show that he had to run out and buy a fresh batch.

Marlene Nelson of the Minnesota-based Sight Creative and Interactive multimedia-design company says that the main advantage of flash drives is their re-usability.


Why USB?

Clearly, the USB Flash Drive is the new hottie in the computer hardware market.

A USB Drive (Universal Serial Bus) is basically a flash memory card which has a USB connector at the end. USB Drives have been called all kinds of names: flash drives, pen drives, thumb drives, memory sticks, jump drives, but one thing is sure – they’re pluggable, portable, and powerful. They weigh as little as a car key, yet can currently store up to 2 GB of data. That’s 33 hours of songs! And three times more than the standard compact disc. Any data that you can store on a CD you can also be stored on a USB Drive.

Part of the magic of the USB Flash Drive lies in its newness and its speed. It is the newest method for the computer to communicate with peripheral devices, and at high speed. Professionals today choose it to transport data from one computer to another.

You can carry a USB Drive around your neck as a necklace, on your key chain or in your pocket.

They are rather like portable hard drives on which you store your important data but, of course, do not have the much bigger capacity of portable hard drives.

What’s more, they can maintain data for 10 years. And in this time, you might replace your computer’s hard drive three times.

USB Drives vs CDs

First of all, the USB Flash Drive is much easier to carry around than a CD. The data transfer is much faster - it can fill up a I GB drive in 3 to 10 minutes! It can store three times more than the standard compact disc. However, the USB drive is much more expensive than optical storage, but it stores so much more, anyway.

Top of the line flash drives can store even 64 GB and more.

Its solid-state design makes it much more robust than the fragile CD. Unlike the CD, it’s not susceptible to scratches that can destroy the stored data.

In fact, some can retain their data even after being submerged in water, or going through a rough machine wash. Dry them completely, and they will continue to function perfectly well.

While CD-RWs can be rewritten up to a 1000 times, the modern NAND-based flash drives can take 500,000 erase/write cycles.

It’s not easy to make small ongoing changes on CDs, but with the USB Drive, this is no problem, and that’s a major advantage.

The Future of the USB Drive

USB flash drives sales in 2008 are predicted to reach 340 million units according to Web-Feet Research.

What’s more, flash drives are competing with hard drive speeds. The recently released Samsung 1.8" SSD device boasts read times of 64 MB per second, which only modern SATA drives can reach.

And they’re bound to get cheaper with semiconductor corporations reducing the cost of the components by integrating different flash drive functions in a single chip.

Lexar is planning to introduce a USB flash card which is a compact USB flash drive intended to replace different kinds of flash memory cards. Pretec designed a similar card, just one quarter of the thickness of the Lexar version. This can also plug into any USB port.

SanDisk has introduced FlashCP, a technology that allows controlled storage and use of copyrighted materials on USB flash drives, mainly meant for students.

Roll over, CD-ROM!

About the Author

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you are concerned about data loss and would like more information on Data Recovery see http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk

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