USB Flashdrives
What comes to your mind when people say pen drives or thumb drives? The first word for me is:
Portability.
This creation is one of the small fascinations in the world that can tremendously help us in our digital world. What are they generally for?The easy transfer of information and can serve as convenient backups.
In case you do not know, pen drive is a flash memory data storage device integrated with a USB interface. They are rewritable, and physically much smaller than CDs and Floppy Disks.
They have many different types of design for the pen drives. A vast variety of shapes and sizes are available for choosing.
They are even miniature sizes that are smaller than ordinary pen drives, and can hold data as much as 64GB! 64GB is not widely available in the market yet, but the time will come soon!
SanDisk, Transcend, Kingston, Quantum and Imation pen drives are some of the branded pen drives that are being produced and sold in the market widely. Pen drives has a starting capacity of 32MB until 64GB, but pen drives under 1GB in capacity are most probably discontinued or stop in production as they are obsolete!
So, what are the advantages of using a pen drive?
- The most obvious reason is portability. So small, you can even keep it in your wallet. Because of it's low weight, you won't even feel a burden carrying it around.
- Easy backups. Important file documents and information can be stored on the pen drive in case your main computer crashes or the need arises when you want to have access to your own information.
- Compatible for all file types. Audio, video and data files are store-able in the pen drive as much as the capacity permits, which enables easier data sharing.
- Adaptability to many systems. It is supported natively by modern operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and other Unix-like systems.
- Boot-able. It can be used to boot an operating system. The general purpose of this is normally for maintenance tasks such as virus-cleaning and low-level data repair.
- Easily misplaced, left behind or lost. Their small sizes make them relatively easy to escape from our sight. This is even if it is attached your keychain.
- Needs computer access. You cannot retrieve data and files without a computer.
- No write-protect mechanism. Write-protecting a pen drive can prevent it from becoming infected by a virus when it is plugged into a virus-contaminated host computer.
This is one of the data storage devices that are readily and widely available in the market. Next up, we will talk about hard disk drives. So stay tuned! (:-Joel Tay
March 1, 2011 at 1:53 AM
I do agree that USB flash drives do really get infected by virus easily, however nowadays most of them contain anti-virus build in program, but it last for 3 months only if I not mistaken. Anyway, thanks for sharing your knowledge :D
March 1, 2011 at 3:32 AM
Pen Drives with the file "autorun.inf" are normally infected with virus. Nevertheless, it is always not safe to run programs simply by letting the Autorun execute itself. There are softwares for computers that disable quick Autoruns that are present in the thumb drives to avoid mishaps.