What is a Flash Drive?

The Flash drive is a portable solid state disk. The term Flash is used to describe non-volatile solid-state memory that can be rewritten many times. Other devices such as the solid state drive can use Flash memory, but this term more commonly refers to the car key sized USB Flash drive.

Other names for this portable drive are: thumb drive, pen drive, jump drive, and memory stick. Some of these names are marketing names but they all convey the idea that this is a compact, lightweight, and portable drive. It’s as easy to carry as your car key.

The memory stick is rapidly replacing the floppy for many reasons. This compact and lightweight drive is more durable than a floppy. Flash memory can hold data for up to 10 years. And it has also been known to survive immersion in water. However, if your flash drive does get wet, it is vital to wait for it to completely dry before plugging it into the USB port.

Many motherboards can support booting from a USB drive. If your main hard drive fails to boot for some reason, it can be helpful to have a bootable pen drive available. This recovery drive could have a disk repair utility or you could just use it to see if the hard drive is still readable.

Best of all, prices are constantly falling, and sizes are constantly increasing. We are truly getting more for less. I hesitate to even mention what the largest size of a thumb drive is today because it will be out of date tomorrow. These memory sticks are so versatile and inexpensive, you can hardly go wrong by always having one available.

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