subject: Floppy Disks To Flash Drives [print this page] What a revolutionary invention, keeping the homework for an entire year in a gadget which is not bigger than a stick of a gum and you can keep it any way you want, sometimes people keep it on a key chain, some carry it around and some attach it with their bags, and with the advancement of technology it is getting smaller and smaller, it is the USB flash drive. A small device invented in the mid of 1999 but commercially released on 2000 by IBM. The first USB flash drive commercially presented on December 15 2000 had a 8 MB (mega bites) of capacity which was 5 times more than a normal floppy disk drive. Trek Tek and IBM were the first companies to sold USB flash drives with the under the name of thumb drive and DiskOnKey. At the beginning those USB flash drives were not as easy to use as these days, a USB hub was required on order to connect it with any computer but at by the end of 2000 Lexar introduced a compact flash (CF) card with a USB connection, and a card reader/writer accompanying that CF card and to eliminate the need of USB hub an additional USB cable was attached with that.
Today, a flash drive is a very easy to use device, it need no charging or no electricity to keep working, just plug it into any computer and the device will appear on your screen itself and you are good to go to save tons of data. Whenever we plug any USB flash drives into a computer it gives you an audible notice making a noise such as a chime and this is absolutely normal for computers these days.
Lets get back into the time a little and have a look at the device that was used to store data before USB flash drive, we are talking about Floppy disks. The most advanced and high tech floppy disk was capable of storing 1.44 (MB) megabytes of data which is sufficient to store a very normal text document. On 1969 the first floppy disk drive was invented but released commercially on 1971 which was a just a read only device and the last series of floppy disk drives 3-inch HiFD was released on 1998/99. At the beginning these floppy drives were normally used in home and offices as a ROM that stores the operating system of any computer but when hard disk drives became affordable the use of a floppy drive was reduced into just keeping any important data.
Benefits of Carrying a Flash Drive
For any loss of precious data one should always keep a USB flash drive so that whenever you lost any data of you would have a backup and none of your data would be lost. USB flash drives comes handy both professionally and non-professionally, students can keep it to print out a copy at school. Student can also use this unique device to perform combine and group study, because of your data is saved in it you can plug it anywhere at any friends house.
