The USB Flash Drive

The USB flash drive is touted as being superior to other portable storage media of the CD, DVD and floppy disks. It packs great storage space, is immune to various data loss scenarios and is magnetic-resistant. It can be and is used for a variety of purposes by personal users and commercial enterprises.

USB flash drives are NAND-type flash memory data storage devices integrated with a USB (universal serial bus) interface. They are typically small, lightweight, removable and rewritable. They are compact and faster with capacity to hold more data. The USB drive is reliable due to lack of moving parts. They have a durable design, which guards it against mechanical and hardware corruption. These types of drives use the USB mass storage standard supported by modern operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and UNIX.

A flash drive usually consists of a small printed circuit board in a plastic or metal casing. The USB connector protrudes from this protection covered by a removable cap. Most flash drives use a standard type-A USB connection allowing them to be connected directly to a port on a personal computer. In order to access the data stored in a flash drive, the drive ought to be connected to a computer. This can be done either by plugging it into a USB host controller built into the computer or into a USB hub. Flash drives can be declared active only when plugged into a USB connection drawing all necessary power from the supply provided by that connection. However, high-speed flash drives require more power than the limited amount provided by a bus-powered USB hub.

There are four parts to a flash drive:

• Male type-A USB connector which provides an interface to the host computer.



• USB mass storage controller that implements the USB host controller and provides a linear interface to block-oriented serial flash devices while hiding the complexities of block-orientation and block erasure. It also wears levelling and balancing. The controller contains a small RISC microprocessor and a small amount of on-chip ROM and RAM.



• NAND flash memory chip that stores data. NAND flash is typically also used in digital cameras.



• Crystal oscillator, which produces the device's main 12 MHz, clock signal controlling the device's data output through a phase-locked loop.

Article Source: http://www.rightarticle.com

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you are concerned about data loss and would like more information on Data Recovery see www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk

Please Rate this Article

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 

Not yet Rated