usb flash drive definition

Flash drives are available in large sizes. Once you have created a document or other work, simply plug your flash drive into a USB port. Applications must be modified for the U3 platform not to leave any data on the host machine. As you create a paper or large project, make a backup on your flash drive and save it separately from your computer for safekeeping. Other forensic suites run from CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, but cannot store data on the media they are run from (although they can write to other attached devices, such as external drives or memory sticks). The internal components of a typical flash drive. Get the Latest Tech News Delivered Every Day, Frequently Asked Questions About USB Flash Drives, How to Eject a Flash Drive From a Chromebook, What You Need to Know About Buying Portable Flash Drives, Carry Everything You Need on a Tiny USB Stick, The 10 Best Hard Drives for Gaming in 2020, The 10 Best Hard Drives for PlayStation 4, How to Choose an SSD, Hybrid, or Hard Disk Drive, The Best Ways to Store Digital Photographs, The 5 Best USB Flash Drives to Store Music in 2020. See more. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. The few, the proud", "Kingston unveils 1 terabyte flash drive", "PK: the World's First USB Kit with 3.1 technology", "The world's biggest flash drive can store more than 160 HD movies", "SanDisk shows off the world's smallest 1TB USB-C flash drive at CES", "PKparis unveils world's smallest Android flash drive | Android Atlas - CNET Reviews", "What's Inside A USB Drive? Most USB-based flash technology integrates a printed circuit board with a metal tip, which is simply soldered on. They are slower than their flash-based counterparts. USB drives give little or no advance warning of failure. As of 2013, single-packaged devices with capacities of 1 TB are readily available,[60] and devices with 16 GB capacity are very economical. USB flash drives have replaced a number of other storage technologies, because they are easier to use. Many users store information on them that is personal, or that should be protected. Sometimes flash drives are also used to run a computer virus scanner. [5][6] People should keep this in mind when they use a flash drive to run application software or an operating system. In the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution X, a special USB flash drive was made by Konami, letting players link the Sony PlayStation 2 version. The drive may be blank drive, or already have documents or software loaded on to it. [31] In 2018, SanDisk announced a 1TB USB-C flash drive, the smallest of its kind. The drive is small and convenient, and more likely to be carried off-site for safety. There have been cases where controller chips were manipulated, and spread malware. Desired mode of operation (either regular USB mass storage device or of floppy drive emulation) is made selectable by a sliding switch on the device's housing. A flash drive (sometimes called a USB device, drive or stick, thumb drive, pen drive, jump drive or USB memory) is a small storage device that can be used to transport files from one computer to another. Delivered to your inbox! Semiconductor corporations have worked to reduce the cost of the components in a flash drive by integrating various flash drive functions in a single chip, thereby reducing the part-count and overall package-cost. Most USB flash drives are dumb devices that hold data. Drives typically use the USB mass storage device class to communicate with the host.[34]. As of March 2016 , flash drives with anywhere from 8 to 256 gigabytes (GB ) were frequently sold, while 512 GB and 1 terabyte(TB ) units were less freq… Unlike solid-state memory, hard drives are susceptible to damage by shock (e.g., a short fall) and vibration, have limitations on use at high altitude, and although they are shielded by their casings, they are vulnerable when exposed to strong magnetic fields. Flash memory cards, e.g., Secure Digital cards, are available in various formats and capacities, and are used by many consumer devices. Some preloaded drives are read-only, but most can be used as a normal flash drive. Many of the smallest players are powered by a permanently fitted rechargeable battery, charged from the USB interface. For consecutive sector writes and reads (for example, from an unfragmented file), most hard drives can provide a much higher sustained data rate than current NAND flash memory, though mechanical latencies seriously impact hard drive performance. These properties make them suitable for transporting data from place to place and keeping the data readily at hand. Usually, such drives will be custom-stamped with a company's logo, as a form of advertising. [47], Regardless of the endurance of the memory itself, the USB connector hardware is specified to withstand only around 1,500 insert-removal cycles. That gradually doubled to 16 MB and then 32, then 516 gigabytes and 1 terabyte. Storage capacity of USB flash drives in 2019 was up to 2 TB while hard disks can be as large as 16 TB. The battery power can be charged from the USB port. Second generation flash drives have claimed to read at up to 30 MB/s and write at about half that rate, which was about 20 times faster than the theoretical transfer rate achievable by the previous model, USB 1.1, which is limited to 12 Mbit/s (1.5 MB/s) with accounted overhead. In October 2010, Apple Inc. released their newest iteration of the MacBook Air, which had the system's restore files contained on a USB hard drive rather than the traditional install CDs, due to the Air not coming with an optical drive.[62]. ", "Flash Memory vs. HDD - which will win? Some USB flash drives use USB plug that does not protect the 4 contacts, with the possibility of plugging it into the USB port the other way around. High speed has become a standard for modern flash drives. They are easy to lose and facilitate unauthorized backups. Flash drives connect to computers and other devices via a built-in USB Type-A or USB-C plug, making a flash drive a kind of combination USB device and cable. The password can then be changed, or it may be possible to crack the password with a password cracking program and gain full control over the computer. The larger their storage space, the faster they tend to operate. In a typical well-conducted review of a number of high-performance USB 3.0 drives, a drive that could read large files at 68 MB/s and write at 46 MB/s, could only manage 14 MB/s and 0.3 MB/s with many small files. So, they are sometimes used to promote a product. Installers of some operating systems can be stored to a flash drive instead of a CD or DVD, including various Linux distributions, Windows 7 and newer versions, and macOS. Since then, artists including Kanye West,[1] Nine Inch Nails and Ayumi Hamasaki [2] have released music and promotional material on USB flash drives. Usually, new firmware image is downloaded and placed onto a FAT16- or FAT32-formatted USB flash drive connected to a system which is to be updated, and path to the new firmware image is selected within the update component of system's firmware. Tim Fisher has 30+ years' professional technology support experience. There are a number of free and open source programs which can be used to encrypt data including TrueCrypt, pgpdisk and FreeOTFE. These differences differ radically from one drive to another; some drives could write small files at over 10% of the speed for large ones. In particular, Mac OS X 10.7 is distributed only online, through the Mac App Store, or on flash drives; for a MacBook Air with Boot Camp and no external optical drive, a flash drive can be used to run installation of Windows or Linux. The failure mechanism for flash memory cells is analogous to a metal fatigue mode; the device fails by refusing to write new data to specific cells that have been subject to many read-write cycles over the device's lifetime. A flash drive is easy to use. USB flash drives are small and light, use little power and have no moving parts. Flash drives can be written and rewritten to an almost unlimited number of times, similar to hard drives. Transfer speeds are technically determined by the slowest of three factors: the USB version used, the speed in which the USB controller device can read and write data onto the flash memory, and the speed of the hardware bus, especially in the case of add-on USB ports. The ubiquity of the FAT32 file system allows the drive to be accessed on virtually any host device with USB support. Special operating systems can run from a bootable flash drive. In many cases, it was easy to decrypt the data, even without knowing the decryption key, because the implementation was not done properly. External hard disk drives currently cost less per gigabyte than flash drives and are available in larger capacities. Such warranties should make the device more attractive for more applications. The first USB flash drive was available for sale in late 2000 with a storage capacity of a mere 8 megabytes. Most USB flash drives do not include a write protection mechanism. History of the USB flash drive. Audio tape cassettes and high-capacity floppy disks (e.g., Imation SuperDisk), and other forms of drives with removable magnetic media, such as the Iomega Zip and Jaz drives, are now largely obsolete and rarely used. Flash memory is a type of computer chip. Serial access requires far fewer electrical connections for the memory chips than does parallel access, which has simplified the manufacture of multi-gigabyte drives. Flash drives use little power, have no fragile moving parts, and for most capacities are small and light. Most drives can be attached to keychains or lanyards. This completely standalone device can instantly and permanently damage or destroy any host hardware that it is connected to. The USB connector may be protected by a removable cap or by retracting into the body of the drive, although it is not likely to be damaged if unprotected. Some hard drives support alternative and faster interfaces than USB 2.0 (e.g., Thunderbolt, FireWire and eSATA). Transport aid – the cap or the body often contains a hole suitable for connection to a, Some drives offer expandable storage via an internal, Bootstrapping an operating system install or. Typically, one of these ICs provides an interface to the USB port, another drives the onboard memory, and the other is the flash memory. Smaller optical media do exist, such as business card CD-Rs which have the same dimensions as a credit card, and the slightly less convenient but higher capacity 80 mm recordable MiniCD and Mini DVD.

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