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usbfactory 2006. May not be reproduced without permission
USB Drives – Good Things Really DO Come In Small Packages
First it was the floppy disk that fell victim to the ZIP® drive, and then the ZIP gave up its throne to the CD/R.
And while the CD/R still holds a high place of honor in the realm of portable storage medium, there’s no question that the USB flash drive is the undisputed leader when it comes to portability, storage capacity and ease of use.
USB drives, also called key drives, flash drives, thumb drives, jump drives, and pen drives, first appeared in 1998. The brainchild of Dov Moran, President and CEO of M-Systems, an Israeli company known for their technological prowess in developing flash memory chips, were first distributed throughout Europe under the brand name of Disgo. They were initially available with 8 MB, 16 MB, 32 MB, and 64 MB storage capacities. Later innovations by Moran and his team enabled storage capacity to be increased to 256 MB.
Meanwhile, in the United States, computer giant IBM was busy creating their own version of the USB drive, released in 2001, with a 16 MB storage capacity. Drives with up to a 4 GB storage capacity are commonly available today.
Other companies, particularly in Asia, began creating knockoffs and pretty soon the market was flooded and prices fell quickly. Today USB drives can be had for as little as U.S. $12 with prices for even the largest capacity drives hovering under U.S. $100. Well, not the largest USB drive. That honor goes to the Kanguru 64 GB USB drive with a retail price of U.S. $630!
USB drives are available everywhere you look. Internet research giant Gartner group reported that 88.2 million USB flash drives were shipped in 2005, and they project that 115.7 million will shipped by the end of 2006.
It’s A Memory Chip With A Little Something Extra
A USB drive is actually a microcomputer in itself with the added ability to retain data when the power is removed. The typical USB drive consists of these basic components:
• A Type-A male USB connector
• An integral USB mass storage controller
• An onboard RISC microprocessor
• A small quantity of ROM and RAM
• A NAND flash memory chip for data storage
• A Crystal oscillator
Current USB drives employ USB 2.0 technology and most are backward compatible to USB 1.0 to address the needs of older computers.
While the earliest USB drives all looked pretty much the same, not unlike a stick of memory wrapped in a plastic or metal wrapper, today’s USB drives come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and colors including ballpoint pen designs, pocket knives and more. You can even buy USB drives with waterproof cases.
Some companies specialize in creating custom logo USB drives that can include the logo of a company that wants to use the devices as promotional give-aways. It is also possible to purchase private-label USB drives that make any company look like they are in the USB drive manufacturing business.
Not All USB Drives Are Equal
While the USB 2.0 specification calls for the port to be able to deliver up to 480Mbps of throughput, not all USB 2.0 drives reach that speed.
In reality, USB 2.0 supports three speeds which are 1.5Mbps (Low Speed), 12Mbps (Full Speed) and the maximum 480Mbps (Hi-Speed). If the drive is not labeled “2.0 Hi-Speed”, then it’s not running at maximum capacity.
There’s more to quality assessment than throughput speed however. The Mean Time Between Failure rate, a measurement of how long a USB drive will function before it dies, runs as high as 100,000 read-write cycles for the better quality drives, but can run as low as 25,000 for cheaper ones that use low-end components.
Read/Write speed is also an issue. The better-performing USB drive models are reporting write speed in the area of 14000 KB / sec and read speeds in the range of 25000 KB / sec. The average performance for mid-range USB drives is around 970 kilobyte per second read speed and 365 kilobytes per second for writes. Anything slower is noticeable when large files are being accessed.
The final consideration when selecting a USB flash drive is the type and speed of the memory itself. Not all flash memory is the same. That’s why it’s wise to choose brand names manufacturers over no-name imports. A faulty flash RAM chip can lose all of your data in a microsecond, and saving a large file on a flash drive with slow memory can be like watching paint dry on the side of a barn.
So, what’s everyone doing with those 115.7 million flash drives that will be shipped in 2006?
The flash drive has found its way into the pockets and onto the key chains of consumers, business people and government employees around the world.
Certainly the most common use for flash drives is to provide a solution to the age-old problem of navigating the “sneaker net”. The manual transfer of files to and from PCs, long the domain of the floppy and ZIP drive, is now the primary reason that people and organizations are buying up so many flash drive each year.
Students are particularly fond of the ease in which files can be saved and transferred between home, school and library computers. But it’s not just homework that’s eating up flash drive space these days. Teens, tweens and young adults are also using their flash drives to store photo albums, music files, e-mail and lots of things that they’d rather Mom and Dad not discover.
Businesses have hopped on the USB flash drive wagon in a big way as well. Like the students, file transfer is a big technology-driver for them but tech-savvy organizations are finding some pretty innovative uses other than sneaker-net.
• Field technicians can carry complete instruction manuals for any type of equipment on one thumb drive instead of hauling around manuals in the back of their truck.
• Small databases with up-to-date customer records, product and pricing information and other regularly-updated files fit well on flash drives.
• I.T. departments can distribute software updates and patch files via flash drives to their remote and field employees.
• Complete customized software applications can be installed and easily moved from computer to computer.
• Flash drives are also starting to be used to apply security policies, guard against spyware and keep anti-virus software current.
With the ability to make flash drives a bootable device, the uses for this technology appear almost endless.
Programmers are also embracing flash drives as excellent platforms for deploying embedded systems, and O/S manufacturers are re-engineering their software to run on these tiny drives. The most notable is a product called Puppy Linux which was built from the ground up to run on portable storage devices including ZIP and flash drives.
Utility companies are cutting labor costs, and speeding up billing cycles, by replacing their old-style analog electric meters with digital meters that can be read by a hand-held device that stores each customer’s electric usage data onto a flash drive. When the meter reader returns to the shop, the drive is plugged into a PC and all of the data is uploaded directly into the billing system.
A big hit in the specialty advertising or promotional gift items field, and especially at high-tech trade shows where a company’s reputation can be made or broken by the quality of the “toys” that they give away at their booths, promotional flash drives are making a name for themselves.
Not only are companies ordering flash drives with their logo imprinted, but many software companies are pre-loading these drives with demo copies of their software products which enable the flash drive to pull double duty as both a PR tool and a sales tool.
And with these deices being available tucked inside of pens, flashlights, pocket knives and even miniature figurines, it’s not just the geeks that are lining up to collect these goodies. Executives and decision makers are snapping up their fair share and that’s just what these publicity-seeking companies are looking for.
For those organizations that are seeking a balance between the convenience of flash drives and security, there are models that come with encryption software pre-installed that keep data safe from unauthorized eyes. And for the truly paranoid, including law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and other organizations with the highest security needs, there are flash drives available that incorporate biometric fingerprint identification technology right into the drive.
Ten years ago no one could have ever imagined that a device so convenient and so capable of multi-tasking would ever be invented. And while it is impossible to predict what technology is going to be like 10 years from now, it’s a safe bet that something pretty amazing is going to have to come along if it plans to knock the USB flash drive out of first place and send it to the museum along with floppy and ZIP drives.
But until that time comes, do your homework, check out all of the available brands and models, and get your hands on a USB flash drive. If you don’t already have one (or more), you’ll surely wonder how you ever lived without it.
Article © usbfactory 2006. May not be reproduced without permission
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