Strengths and weaknesses of USB Memory

Flash drives are immune to scratches and dust that affects the previous forms of portable storage such as CDs and diskettes. Its durable solid-state design means that in many cases can survive casual abuse (hitting, falling, footsteps, passed by the washing and splashing). This makes it ideal for transporting personal data or work files to which you want to access in multiple locations. The near ubiquity of USB support on modern computers means that a device will work almost everywhere. However, Microsoft Windows 98 does not support USB devices Mass Storage generic driver must be installed separately for each manufacturer or failing to get generics. For Microsoft Windows 95 such drivers are almost nonexistent.

Flash drives are a relatively dense storage to store the device cheaper so dozens of floppy disks, and for a moderate price reaches the CD or exceed in size. Historically, the size of these units has varied from several megabytes to a few gigabytes. In 2003, the drives are USB 1.0/1.1 speeds, about 1.5 Mbit / s or 12 Mbit / s. In 2004 it launched the device with USB 2.0. Although USB 2.0 can deliver up to 480 Mbit / s, flash drives are limited by the bandwidth of the device internal memory. Therefore reach read speeds up to 100 Mbit / s, write operations by a little slower. Optimally, a USB device can retain information for about 10 years.

Flash memories implement the standard "USB mass storage device class" (class of USB mass storage devices). This means that most modern operating systems can read and write to these drives without additional drivers. Instead of exposing the complex technical details underlying flash devices export a logical unit block-structured data to the host operating system. The operating system can use the file system or block addressing scheme you want. Some computers have the ability to boot from flash memory, but this capacity depends on the BIOS of each computer, in addition to this, the unit must be loaded with an image of a boot disk.

The flash memory can support a finite number of cycles of read / write before failing, normal use, the midrange is about several million cycles. However, the write operations will become slower as the unit ages.

This should be taken into consideration when using a flash drive to run from these software applications or operating system. To handle this (in addition to the limited space in common units), some developers have released versions of operating systems like Linux or Mozilla Firefox common applications such as specially designed to be run from flash drives. This is achieved by reducing the size of swap files and storing them in RAM. Learn more details in Colombia and USB flash drives all types of advertising