Our tester highly recommended this flash drive for iOS mobile users: “The iXpand is a great resource for backing up media files and for expanding storage, as well as transferring files to a PC.” He added, “The Drive App is easy to navigate and copy files with, as well as operate the camera and play music and video files.” On the other hand, our reviewer reported, “The 30 MB/s write speed on PC is far from horrible but definitely slow for the asking price, and we calculated only about a 12 MB/s when connected to an iOS device.” He ultimately concluded, “A slightly cheaper price would make it the surefire winner in the Lightning connector category.”
Most flash drives ship preformatted with the FAT32, or exFAT file systems. The ubiquity of the FAT32 file system allows the drive to be accessed on virtually any host device with USB support. Also, standard FAT maintenance utilities (e.g., ScanDisk) can be used to repair or retrieve corrupted data. However, because a flash drive appears as a USB-connected hard drive to the host system, the drive can be reformatted to any file system supported by the host operating system.
A USB flash drive, also commonly known as a thumb drive or a memory stick, is a type of portable data storage device that fits directly into a USB port. It can back up, store, and transfer important data and make that data available to other devices with USB ports. USB drives tend to favor speed and convenience over absolute storage space; discover the wide selection available on eBay.
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Specially manufactured flash drives are available that have a tough rubber or metal casing designed to be waterproof and virtually "unbreakable". These flash drives retain their memory after being submerged in water, and even through a machine wash. Leaving such a flash drive out to dry completely before allowing current to run through it has been known to result in a working drive with no future problems. Channel Five's Gadget Show cooked one of these flash drives with propane, froze it with dry ice, submerged it in various acidic liquids, ran over it with a jeep and fired it against a wall with a mortar. A company specializing in recovering lost data from computer drives managed to recover all the data on the drive.[64] All data on the other removable storage devices tested, using optical or magnetic technologies, were destroyed.
With wide deployment(s) of flash drives being used in various environments (secured or otherwise), the issue of data and information security remains important. The use of biometrics and encryption is becoming the norm with the need for increased security for data; on-the-fly encryption systems are particularly useful in this regard, as they can transparently encrypt large amounts of data. In some cases a secure USB drive may use a hardware-based encryption mechanism that uses a hardware module instead of software for strongly encrypting data. IEEE 1667 is an attempt to create a generic authentication platform for USB drives. It is supported in Windows 7 and Windows Vista (Service Pack 2 with a hotfix).[47]
There's a lot to choose from when it comes to buying a flash drive. The most important thing to consider is size. The whole point of a USB drive is to store lots of data in a small space, so think about what kinds of files you'll want to house on your flash drive. Movies and music take quite a bit of space, so if you're carrying your whole entertainment library with you, you'll want a big thumb drive – at least 16GB. Books and other text-based documents require relatively little storage space, so people like students and working professionals using Microsoft Office would be happy transferring Word documents or Excel files with as little as 1GB of space. On the other hand, if you are using photo or music editing software, you'll want a USB flash drive with lots of storage capacity to transfer graphic and music files.
