Usb Drive or Flash Drive? What's the Difference?

If you have ever purchased a small transportable drive for school or the office (or received one as a giveaway at a trade show), you have probably heard it called by many names: jump drive, memory stick, flash drive, thumb drive, or Usb drive.

What Does 'Usb' Stand For?

Kingston

Of all those colloquial terms, the precise one is Usb drive, with Usb standing for 'universal serial bus'. Unless you think yourself to be a nerd/geek/computer freak, that term will probably mean nothing to you, but the 'computer speak' is de facto simpler than it sounds.

Universal Serial Bus plainly refers to the development of a new universal industry standard of connections between all the peripheral components that your computer can use with other electronic devices. Your keyboard and mouse were the first (although those are becoming increasingly wireless as the technology improves), but other components would comprise printers, external disk drives, cameras, and most recently pdas, and smart phones. The term 'serial' signifies that the new protocol was replacing the existing option of serial or parallel ports (such as the old 'pin' type connectors for printers).

The push for this new protocol came, not surprisingly, from electronic manufacturers and software developers who were facing increasingly complex configurations of devices to be related to computers. In 1994, a group of seven associates - Compaq, Dell, Dec, Ibm, Intel, Microsoft, Nec, and Nortel began development of the Usb drive (and corresponding Usb ports). Intel produced the first silicon for Usb in 2005. By 2008 over 2 billion Usb devices were being sold each year.

So Where Did The Other Names Come From?
The drives enabled files to 'jump' from one computer to another, the cheapest drives look like small plastic 'sticks' (usually black), and they're about the size of your 'thumb' (though getting smaller all the time!). The term 'flash' refers to the 'flash memory' chip (that pre-dated Usb drives by about 15 years) that could be electrically erased and reprogrammed complicated times.

Ibm produced the first commercially ready Usb drive in 2000 with a storage capacity of 8Mb - pitifully small by today's standards but still more than five times the capacity of the floppy disks in use at the time. storage capacity has grown exponentially since then - Kingston introduced its Data tourist 300 in 2009 with 256Gb of storage capacity, and the 512Gb can't be far behind.

Unfortunately, change speed hasn't grown quite as quickly. Usb1.0, released in 1996, allowed a data change speed of between 1.5 and 12 Mbits/s (Megabits of memory per second). Usb2.0 was released in April 2000 with a "Hi-Speed" bandwidth of 480 Mbits/s (about 60Mb per second). Usb3.0 was announced in November 2008 with transmission speeds of up to 5Gbits/s but new drives are only just beginning to come to market.

Usb Drive or Flash Drive? What's the Difference?