Flash Drive (USB Drive)

Also known as Pen Drive is the next revolution in secondary portable storage device. Initially emerged with couple of MB storage capacity, it quickly gained attraction due to its solid state rugged construction and its capability of being used on any computer equipped with USB port. Initially it needed a specific driver to be installed on the earlier OS in order to be used, but later, due to its universally open standard and rise in use of the USB port, its support was provided natively in the OS. (Windows/Macintosh/Linux supports it natively out of the box).

So now virtually nothing more is needed for this drive to work if you have a computer with a standard USB port. Though the manufacturers are also providing additional features to the hardware like encryption, but these features generally requires additional software/driver to be installed in order to be used. And since there is not much standard for these features yet it is mostly device specific and is largely ignored for its lack of compatibility.
 

This standardization of protocol has lead to not only popularity of the USB flash drives, but has also provided a common way for other media to act as drive via this protocol. So now there are storage products making use of this standard to become USB drives (also called USB Mass Storage). Example includes:
- USB Hard Disk Drives
- Zip Drive with USB interface
- digital camera acting as an USB drive for accessing the photographs directly on any computer
- PDAs like Palm that already connect to the computer using USB acts as a USB drive for accessing the data stored in its memory and SD/MMC Card
- Mp3 players that doubles as USB drive!!
 

The list of applications are getting bigger and bigger, ultimately making this drive a very popular and successful.

Currently 1 GB USB flash drives are available, and bigger drives are on the horizon.