History of the USB Flash Drive
Usb flash drives are small nand memory storage devices with a USB interface. The benefits of being small, portable, rewritable and easily installed and removed without requiring drivers (except for Windows 98) were much desired qualities.
These pocket usb flash memory devices took off in popularity and with their relatively simple design were much copied and spurred numerous manufacturers to start pumping out flash drives in droves. Dozens and dozens of companies now produce usb flash drives.
Consisting of merely a small circuit board with memory chips encased in a plastic housing usb memory drives are quite simple to produce. The only difference between many devices are the memory speed and plastic casing. The type-A USB connector on the end is the standard usb port used by all personal computers.
Originally many small Asian startups based in China, Korea and elsewhere were producing these with most of the manufacturing done in China.
While the original major manufacturers like M Systems and Trek are still around, many of the smaller fly by night outfits have disappeared, victims of cutthroat competition, fluctuating memory prices and the bargaining power the majors could command. Besides, many of the main memory manufacturers got into the act themselves. Sandisk, Kingston, Transcend, Lexar, Kingston etc. started manufacturing and selling their own usb flash drives.
Usb flash drive capacities have increased on orders of magnitude since its’ inception, perhaps even surpassing Moore’s law. Usb flash drives currently can be purchased at up to 64gb closely matching even laptop hard drive capacities, albeit at much higher costs.
Beyond storing files USB flash drives have found other uses, among them:
- Computer repair and configuration files for system administrators for computer maintenance and recovery
- Storing applications; as capacities have increased it becomes feasible to keep full applications on the usb flash drive so a user can work on any computer without needing to install software. The U3 standard and consortium backed by flash drive vendors, offers an API to flash drive-specific features. This feature is especially for people who travel a lot or system administrators.
- Boot drive. Live USB is the term used for booting any operating system from a bootable usb flash drive.
- USB base music players. Certain USB flash drives have morphed into mp3 players with the addition of sound output, music control buttons and usb plug. Creative was the first to do so and others like Apple’s Shuffle have followed.
Windows new operating system, Vista claims to take advantage of usb flash drives to make the booting operation faster by storing certain files in it’s non volatile memory.