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A flash drive (also thumb drive, memory stick, and pen drive/pendrive) [1] [note 1] is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc , and usually weighs less than 30 g (1 oz).
USB flash drive: Various USB 1.1/2.0/3.0/3.1 2000/2001 1 TB+ (not to scale) Universally compatible across most non-mobile computer platforms, their greater size suits them better to file transfer/storage instead of use in portable devices
A flash drive, a typical USB mass-storage device An M.2 (2242) solid-state-drive connected into USB 3.0 adapter and connected to computer. The USB mass storage device class (MSC or UMS) standardizes connections to storage devices. At first intended for magnetic and optical drives, it has been extended to support flash drives and SD card readers.
The USB mass storage device class (also known as USB MSC or UMS) is a set of computing communications protocols, specifically a USB Device Class, defined by the USB Implementers Forum that makes a USB device accessible to a host computing device and enables file transfers between the host and the USB device. To a host, the USB device acts as an ...
Such storage devices may refer to removable media (e.g. punched paper, magnetic tape, floppy disk and optical disc), compact flash drives (USB flash drive and memory card), portable storage devices (external solid-state drive and enclosured hard disk drive), or network-attached storage.
The turn of the millennium saw the widespread introduction of solid-state removable media, with the SD card being introduced in 1999, followed by the USB flash drive in 2000. [21] The capacity of these removable flash drives improved over time, with 2013 seeing Kingston unveiling a 1 terabyte USB flash drive.
The /media directory exists on many Unix systems (as specified in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) and is intended specifically for use as a mount point for removable media such as CDs, DVDs, USB drives or floppy disks. It may be empty, or it may contain subdirectories for mounting individual devices.
Desktop hard drives can sustain anywhere from 2 to 10 times the transfer speed of USB 2.0 flash drives but are equal to or slower than USB 3.0 and Firewire (IEEE 1394) for sequential data. USB 2.0 and faster flash drives have faster random access times: typically around 1 ms, compared to 12 ms for mainstream desktop hard drives.