Hardware designers later developed EEPROMs with the erasure region broken up into smaller "fields" that could be erased individually without affecting the others. Altering the contents of a particular memory location involved copying the entire field into an off-chip buffer memory, erasing the field, modifying the data as required in the buffer, and re-writing it into the same field. This required considerable computer support, and PC-based EEPROM flash memory systems often carried their own dedicated microprocessor system. Flash drives are more or less a miniaturized version of this.
In a typical well-conducted review of a number of high-performance USB 3.0 drives, a drive that could read large files at 68 MB/s and write at 46 MB/s, could only manage 14 MB/s and 0.3 MB/s with many small files. When combining streaming reads and writes the speed of another drive, that could read at 92 MB/s and write at 70 MB/s, was 8 MB/s. These differences differ radically from one drive to another; some drives could write small files at over 10% of the speed for large ones. The examples given are chosen to illustrate extremes....′[46]
It's never been easier to take all the files, data or media you want with you wherever you go. Generally about the size of a stick of gum, a USB flash drive lets you store any file from your computer so you can save it, transport it, and load it onto another computer in seconds. You simply plug the flash drive into your USB port and drag any files you want onto its icon on your desktop. Best of all, flash drives have no internal moving parts, so they're very resistant to breaking by being bumped or dropped.
