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USB Flash Drives: Components, Uses, and Myths Dispelled

USB Flash Drives: Components, Uses, and Myths Dispelled

The USB flash drive—also known as a jump drive, data stick, or thumb drive—continues to be the most popular portable storage device, with sales estimated to exceed 500 million annually by 2020. Although cloud storage is making headway in the same market spaces, USB drives offer capacity, speed, and size that make them ideal for many uses beyond just storage, including some perhaps unexpected uses as well. This article explores what’s inside a USB flash drive, explores various uses, and dispels common myths.

A Look Inside

A typical USB flash drive includes a USB connector, a mass storage controller, one or more flash memory chips, and a crystal oscillator, as well as additional features such as jumpers, LEDs, switches, and unpopulated space.

The memory capacity and speed of USB drives continue to increase. As of the time of this writing, 512GB USB drives are becoming common, with 1TB capacity also available. The average speed for a highly-ranked 64GB USB 3.0 device is 104MB/s for a write operation and 171MB/s for a read operation.

Recently, USB drives incorporated the Type-C connector, which provides a yet even smaller and thinner connector compared to the Type-A connector. The Type-C connector has a rounded, symmetric shape that fits into ports easily yet securely, and works either way up (solving the problem that everyone has faced where they have to stick a USB plug in three times before it eventually goes in). Figure 2 shows a USB drive that accommodates both the old and the new sockets.

How to plug a thin promo USB Drive into a computer?

Technological advances have allowed a regular USB to become increasingly compact. While the more modern, state-of-the-art USBs are thinner, sleeker and sexier, they have a bit of a learning curve associated with using them. In particular, first time users often are not sure which direction the USB should be facing when plugged in to a USB port. Among other types of promo flash drives, these include our famous promotional Wafer USB Cards, and custom USB Clip.