Favourite storage device - flash drives

The device I will be enlightening you with today is the USB flash drive, often incorrectly and colloquially called a memory stick (more on that later), or a USB/pen drive/stick. They are probably the most used external storage device used, a title deserving given their usefulness and versatility. They are extremely small, but can hold more data than a floppy disk or CDs, and are more robust because of their solid state features: they have no moving parts, which makes damaging them physically harder (the only problems I'v ever hard were when I had accidently squashed the male end of my flash drive, so it physically was unable to fit into the female USB port.

Now, I'm a pedant. Anyone who knows me (and given the nature of this blog, that would mean everyone who is reading this), knows I am a really pedantic pedant (if you'll forgive the tautology for emphasis). What really infuriates me is when people call flash drives: 'memory stick'.



WRONG


Wrong wrong wrong.

This is a memory stick:

It is actually a type of memory card. It is a Sony product, that is mainly used in Sony (and some other) digital cameras, as well as Sony's PlayStation Portable.

THIS is a flash drive:

This particular one is a SanDisk Cruzer brand, of 4GB size. Using the term 'flash drive' and 'memory stick' interchangeably is like using 'chair' and 'table' interchangeably. IT'S JUST WRONG!!!!!!

Rant over :)  Now we have cake.

Nah, the cake is a lie, but back to flash drives. They are wondrously compact.  Of course, SD cards are smaller, but for that reason, they're easier to lose. And you cannot attach them to key ring. Flash drives you can. To show you the scale of their compactness, you can fit the data on these punched cards:

On the 4GB flash drive above. That's almost as compact as this:

Unfortunately, flash drives haven't advanced to the state where they can give us the power to fly and shoot energy weapons :(

As well as storing data, flash drives can hold applications or even full OS on them. Another feature I just discovered is that I can use my flash drive (as well as an external hard drive or memory card), to act as a cache, using a Windows program (available on Vista and 7) called ReadyBoost. They can also be used to backup data, but personally I wouldn't, because the small size makes the data easy to lost. I would use my external HDD. The small and light aspect of the device, as well as being hot-pluggable makes it optimal for transferring data.