subject: What Are The Advantages Of USB Flash Drives? [print this page] What Are The Advantages Of USB Flash Drives?
USB flash drives are portable and small flash memory devices. They easily plug into a USB port of the computer and work as a portable hard drive. These USB flash drives are also known by various names such as thumb drives, flash drives, pen drives, jump drives, memory stick and even key drives. The pen drives use the USB Mass Storage Standard, which is well supported by all the preset day operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix.
The USB Flash drives consist of a small printed circuit board, which is properly enclosed in plastic or metal. The USB connector emerges out from this plastic or metal protection. Very often, this has a metal cap covering its head. It can also be retracted into the body of the drive. Thus, there are no movable parts in the USB Drive, and this makes it reliable for usage.
These days, most of the computers do not contain a floppy drive. Instead, they have a USB port which helps to connect the computer/ laptop to this device. The memory stick is usually plugged into the USB Port of the computer with the help of a USB connector, and the data is then accessed.
What are the uses of USB Flash Drives?
The USB flash drives are commonly used to store data. Given the compact size and structure of the device, it can store large amount of data of various kinds. The flash drives are also used for the reason of booting the system, computer repair, system administration and application carriers.
You can also get the USB audio players in the market. These devices also at times have places for plugging in a pair of headphones. It also includes tiny buttons that are used to play, pause, stop or forward the music tracks, which are stored in the device. There are several uses and advantages of the USB drives which can be summarized as follows:
They are scratch proof device as compared to the floppy drives
They are usually compact
They are also durable
There are diverse types of pen drives having different types of memory storage capacity
The flash drives are fast and they consume less power
The number of write and erase cycles that a USB Drive can sustain depends on its quality. At a normal, they can sustain at least a few hundred thousand of such cycles. However, be careful while using a USB flash drive too many times as they may make the system vulnerable to virus attacks.
