Compact Flash Drive

It is one of those things you have heard of but you are not sure about its function and you might be wondering what a flash drive is and how to use a flash drive.

A compact flash drive or often times just called flash drive is a storage device. The technology for the flash drive is a combination of more than one older technology and was first introduced into the market in 2000. It is a memory storage device and because of its small size combined with low energy consumption it is easy to carry around in a pocket and transfer data from one PC to another.

The device technology is actually based on EEPROM (Electrical erasable programmable read only memory) technology which back then had a very limited capacity and slow reading and even slower writing speed. It needed a high voltage supply and a whole complicated circuit to be used.

With the development of USB, high speed serial data communication, a possible usage for a fast and easy transportable data storage arose and with the progress in the microprocessor industry and development of ever greater storage capacity in ever shrinking sizes it was possible to manufacture a storage drive that would fit inside your jeans pocket.

The first flash drives on the market had only a storage capacity of 32 or 64 MB (Mega Byte), nowadays a 1GB (Giga Byte) flash drive or a 2GB flash drive are a common sight. If you want more storage than that, yes it is available. Some companies have figured out how to produce 4GB flash drives and even 8GB flash drives in a size smaller than most rubber erasers.

If 8 GB is still not enough storage for you, the newest thing on the market in 2007 is the world largest USB thumb drive, a 16GB flash drive.

Cheap flash drives under 1 GB are now available for under 10, sometimes even under 5 Dollars.
Lots of digital camera manufacturers even offer a free flash drive with their cameras so that you easily can carry around your pictures and play them on any of family and friends PCs.

A 2Gb flash drive has often been used for MP3 Players with some electronics, software and a small micro controller added.

If you should ever be in need of a boot disk but you don’t have one, a bootable flash drive can do the same trick. A friend or any computer store can convert your flash drive into a bootable flash drive just by adding some software.

For most flash drives driver software is already added to the PCs operating system and they can be used as plug and play. Should you have trouble running you flash drive or the driver is missing in your system, flash drive software can be found on CDs usually delivered with your drive or on the manufacturers pages online for download