Capacity - More so than any other feature, capacity will drive the price of a flash drive up the most. So before you make a purchase, consider how much you’re willing to spend on a flash drive and weigh that against how much capacity you’ll likely need. A flash drive with 16GB can cost you as little as $10, while a 128GB one will run up to $60 or more.
Flash drives are also cost-effective. You can securely store a few dozen gigabytes of data for less than $30, and these devices range in storage capacity, price and overall size - equal to the amount you're willing to invest. Some even have special features like lanyards, locks, belt clips and key fobs to make them easier to carry and keep track of.
Most USB-based flash technology integrates a printed circuit board with a metal tip, which is simply soldered on. As a result, the stress point is where the two pieces join. The quality control of some manufacturers does not ensure a proper solder temperature, further weakening the stress point.[77][78] Since many flash drives stick out from computers, they are likely to be bumped repeatedly and may break at the stress point. Most of the time, a break at the stress point tears the joint from the printed circuit board and results in permanent damage. However, some manufacturers produce discreet flash drives that do not stick out, and others use a solid metal uni-body that has no easily discernible stress point. SD cards serve as a good alternative to USB drives since they can be inserted flush.
The New York-based Human Rights Foundation collaborated with Forum 280 and USB Memory Direct to launch the "Flash Drives for Freedom" program.[80][81] The program was created in 2016 to smuggle flash drives with American and South Korean movies and television shows, as well as a copy of the Korean Wikipedia, into North Korea to spread pro-Western sentiment.[82][83]
USB flash drives have been integrated into other commonly carried items, such as watches, pens, and even the Swiss Army Knife; others have been fitted with novelty cases such as toy cars or Lego bricks. USB flash drives with images of dragons, cats or aliens are very popular in Asia.[36] The small size, robustness and cheapness of USB flash drives make them an increasingly popular peripheral for case modding.
Artists have sold or given away USB flash drives, with the first instance believed to be in 2004 when the German punk band Wizo released the Stick EP, only as a USB drive. In addition to five high-bitrate MP3s, it also included a video, pictures, lyrics, and guitar tablature.[58] Subsequently, artists including Nine Inch Nails and Kylie Minogue[59] have released music and promotional material on USB flash drives. The first USB album to be released in the UK was Kiss Does... Rave, a compilation album released by the Kiss Network in April 2007.[60]
Particularly with the advent of USB, external hard disks have become widely available and inexpensive. External hard disk drives currently cost less per gigabyte than flash drives and are available in larger capacities. Some hard drives support alternative and faster interfaces than USB 2.0 (e.g., Thunderbolt, FireWire and eSATA). For consecutive sector writes and reads (for example, from an unfragmented file), most hard drives can provide a much higher sustained data rate than current NAND flash memory, though mechanical latencies seriously impact hard drive performance.
USB flash drives usually specify their read and write speeds in megabytes per second (MB/s); read speed is usually faster. These speeds are for optimal conditions; real-world speeds are usually slower. In particular, circumstances that often lead to speeds much lower than advertised are transfer (particularly writing) of many small files rather than a few very large ones, and mixed reading and writing to the same device.
Flash drives can be defragmented. There is a widespread opinion that defragmenting brings little advantage (as there is no mechanical head that moves from fragment to fragment), and that defragmenting shortens the life of the drive by making many unnecessary writes.[37] However, some sources claim[38] that defragmenting a flash drive can improve performance (mostly due to improved caching of the clustered data), and the additional wear on flash drives may not be significant.
The applications of current data tape cartridges hardly overlap those of flash drives: on tape, cost per gigabyte is very low for large volumes, but the individual drives and media are expensive. Media have a very high capacity and very fast transfer speeds, but store data sequentially and are very slow for random access of data. While disk-based backup is now the primary medium of choice for most companies, tape backup is still popular for taking data off-site for worst-case scenarios and for very large volumes (more than a few hundreds of TB). See LTO tapes.
A recent development for the use of a USB Flash Drive as an application carrier is to carry the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE) application developed by Microsoft. COFEE is a set of applications designed to search for and extract digital evidence on computers confiscated from suspects.[48] Forensic software is required not to alter, in any way, the information stored on the computer being examined. Other forensic suites run from CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, but cannot store data on the media they are run from (although they can write to other attached devices, such as external drives or memory sticks).
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