One of the recent advancement of usb flash memory drives is that they not only acts as a portable device for data transfer and storage, they also serve as a bootable device just like your floppy or cdrom. This can be achieved only if the computer’s motherboard allows booting from USB devices. If the option is available, the computer can boot from the usb flash memory just like booting from a formatted hard drive. After this concept the enterprising users starting inserting all sorts of interesting programs and operating systems into USB keys for easier access. Turning your usb drive to a useful device for booting is very simple process. The recently manufactured motherboards all come with the option of booting from the bios and thus serving a farewell for floppy disk drives. Floppy disks are mainly used as a troubleshooting tool as they can perform a clean boot and lot of troubleshooting process in DOS environment. Apart from this they are also used to update the computer’s BIOS. All the above said features can be easily done with the usb flash memory drives too. Normally the bios is flashed to have the recent updates for your brand of motherboard to support newer hardware configurations.
The day to day developments in the field of technology has given us with numerous products that are very useful for mankind. One such fantastic device is the USB flash memory drive. In the earlier days storage of large files was difficult and also power failure was a threat. Hence USB Flash Memory drives were introduced which provided improved space for data storage together with memory chips that has the capacity to save data even when power failure occurs. USB pen drives are available in various ranges and combinations which gives the individual the opportunity to choose the desired capacity one. Sensitiveness was a major hurdle that was witnessed while using floppies and even compact disks. The floppy disks had to be safeguarded from dust and any other mechanical damage as these would interrupt with the working of the device. The USB Pen Drive was designed in such a way that it is resistant to wear, tear and damage and dust. Rug proof, crush proof and even water proof USB flash drives are also available which are able to withstand high degrees of temperatures and pressure. Hence these devices are perfect portable storage devices and are widely used by people all over the world while travelling.
A USB port or Universal Serial Bus port is an interface of a computer with small rectangular 4- wire external ports ideal for both data transfer as well as power supply. Data transfer is made possible through peripherals like usb flash memory and others of the sort. The two interfaces possible are 1.1 and 2.0 according to the speed ratings for USB. The most common in use, 2.0 interface tops to 480Megabits/second, while the former had only 12Mbs. Flash memory is non- volatile, solid state computer storage used for storage and transfer of data. It is electrically programmable and erasable, and therefore, a type of EEPROM. Before, storage through this sort of memory required erasing of the entire data on the chip, which took pretty lot of time. A special type of flash EEPROM has an in built wiring circuit to rectify this problem. Now that erase can be done at once in blocks, rewriting is made easier and faster. This is what makes usb flash memory unique. This fast read access in combination with durability of the drive is the root causes of its popularity. Forget those technicalities of diodes, wirings and memory- this is the technology of today ought to make us live an easier life.