One day of your life you took the decision of buying a small portable drive for your school or your office or just for fun (maybe you received this drive as a giveaway at a trade show),maybe you have heard it called by a lot of names : memory stick , flash drive , thumb drive ,or USB Drive.

So What is an USB drive?

Of all of the past terms the correct one is USB Drive with ‘universal serial bus’ for USB. The push for this new protocol came, not surprisingly, from electronic manufacturers and software developers who were facing increasingly complex configurations of devices to be connected to computers. In 1994, a group of seven companies – Compaq, Dell, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, and Nortel began development of the USB drive (and corresponding USB ports). Intel produced the first silicon for USB in 2005. By 2008 over 2 billion USB devices were being sold each year.

So Where Did The Other Names Come From?

The drives enabled files to ‘jump’ from one computer to another, the cheapest drives look like small plastic ‘sticks’ (usually black), and they’re about the size of your ‘thumb’ (though getting smaller all the time!). The term ‘flash’ refers to the ‘flash memory’ chip (that pre-dated USB drives by about 15 years) that could be electrically erased and reprogrammed multiple times.
IBM produced the first commercially available USB drive in 2000 with a storage capacity of 8MB – pitifully small by today’s standards but still more than five times the capacity of the floppy disks in use at the time. Storage capacity has grown exponentially since then – Kingston introduced its Data Traveler 300 in 2009 with 256GB of storage capacity, and the 512GB can’t be far behind.
Unfortunately, transfer speed hasn’t grown quite as quickly. USB1.0, released in 1996, allowed a data transfer speed of between 1.5 and 12 Mbits/s (Megabits of memory per second). USB2.0 was released in April 2000 with a “Hi-Speed” bandwidth of 480 Mbits/s (about 60MB per second). USB3.0 was announced in November 2008 with transmission speeds of up to 5Gbits/s but new drives are only just starting to come to market.

In abouttricks.com you can find all sort of tech news related to Data Recovery,Hard Drive Failure , USB drives ,software reviews,firefox,Computer Support,Laptop Computer,PC tips,etc

No related posts.