In the world of portable data storage devices, the latest offering to hit the market is USB drives. In a very short of period of time, they have become immensely popular because of their formidable advantages over other storage media.
USB devices, also called thumb drives or pen drives due to their small size, store data in flash memory cards that are integrated with high-speed, mass-storage Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface. These are stand-alone independent devices which do not need their own power supply or separate drives to operate.
Advantages
USB drives are the latest technology in the market. They benefit from all the R&D and technical advances that have taken place in data storage media industry in the last decade. Unlike hard drives or tape drives, these drives have no moving parts inside them. Thus, there is no danger that any component will develop some mechanical defect and the device will stop working. USB drives are quite reliable and can provide uninterrupted service for a number of years.
Another major benefit of USB drives is that these are stand-alone devices. You do not have to buy a drive separately to work with them, unlike optical disks where the cost of the removable media is negligible but the drive costs a tidy sum.
Since USB drives have no moving parts or complex data-recording mechanism inside, it is possible for them to be very small in size and light in weight. Indeed, USB drives can easily be hidden on your person and no one will even get to know that you are carrying a huge amount of data with you.
USB drives come with a tough plastic shell that can take a lot of abuse. Unlike portable hard disks, these drives are not affected much if you drop them to the ground because they do not have any delicate electro-magnetic components.
USB drives do not use magnetic surface to store data. Due to this, they are totally immune to strong magnetic fields. This is a huge advantage over other portable storage media such as floppy disks and external hard drives which can lose their data when subjected to a magnetic field.
Do not be fooled by the small size of USB drives. They can store a huge amount of data. Commonly available drives can hold up to 8 GB of digital data, though drives having capacities of up to 30 GB are also available. Due to this, USB drives are increasingly seen as a technology that has the potential to shatter monopoly of hard drives as the primary storage media for computers and laptops.
Because there are no moving parts or electric motor inside a USB drive, they have minimum electricity consumption. No spare electricity cable is needed for them, unlike some external hard drives. They derive whatever limited power they need through the USB port itself.
These drives use the USB interface to communicate with the operating system. Due to this, they are very easy to install (plug and play) and can afford a very fast data-transfer speed of up to 480 megabits per second, which is much higher than even top-of-the-line hard drives.
One more formidable advantage of USB drives is that they are reusable. You can store data on them as many times as you want for many years.
Disadvantages
USB drives are very small in size. They can be easily hidden. Indeed, they are the data storage media of choice for employees to steal confidential information from their employers. The former manage to easily smuggle these drives out of the office. USB drives are also easily misplaced because of their tiny size.
USB drives are the latest devices to enter the market. They are yet to develop economies of scale and are therefore priced much higher than optical disks which remain the most popular portable storage media today. However, it is only a matter of a couple of years before USB drives manage to catch up because of their tremendous popularity with computer users.
All USB drives have a printed circuit board inside them. Data can get lost if this board develops a defect. USB drives are tiny in size. They can easily get crushed underfoot or under some heavy object, destroying all their data. USB drives can also suffer damage if dropped into water or fire. Sometimes data on a USB drive may get lost due to user-inflicted errors such as accidental deletion of files or reformatting.
In cases of software errors, it is possible to recover data from the USB drive by using any commonly available DIY recovery software. However, if there is hardware damage, then you have no option but to send the drive to a professional data recovery company.