Jump Up Your Flash Drive

Having problems making your information portable is a thing of the past and the answer is the size of your little finger. USB Flash Drives, also known as a Jump Drive or Thumb Drive, have quickly risen to the occasion, providing fast portable and almost indestructible data storage at a price that is very affordable.

USB Flash Drives were first marketed by Trek Technologies and IBM in the year 2000. Trek dubbed their Flash drive the "Thumb Drive" and IBM called theirs the "DiskOneKey". IBM's USB flash drive had a storage capacity of only 8MB with a transfer rate of about 1MB/s.

Second generation flash drives are the norm for today's data storage needs. All manufactured flash drives have USB 2.0 connectivity. People use flash drives for a variety of reasons. The most common personal use of a USB flash drive is for storage of videos, music, documents and personal information such as banking, bills and identification. This is all made secure by the encryption that is part of the software package placed on the drive by the manufacture. Software packages with encryption are standard on USB flash drives, considering that the portability of the drive also makes it vulnerable to theft. Most of the security is software based; however, some secure USB drives are equipped with a hardware based mechanism that securely encrypts the data better than software.

Another valuable use for the flash drive is that it can carry applications to be run on host computers without uploading the application onto the host device. While many stand alone applications have this ability, they will still store data onto the host devices hard drive during their operation. The USB flash drive acts as or actually is recognized by the host device as an external drive, thus all processes are run through the flash drive instead of the host device hard drive.

Flash drives have become extremely popular with system administrators who load the drive with software used for maintenance and troubleshooting. Administrators can also use the flash drive as a means to recover data and load antivirus software, while archiving a portion of the host devices' data. Flash drives have begun to replace the CD-ROMs by carrying necessary installers or with update information. USB flash drives can also be used to augment operate operating system memory.

The price is right! USB flash drives have become more affordable in recent years due to the competitive nature of the industry. There are several companies that manufacture and distribute them. The prices do however reflect not only their performance and durability but how they are decorated. Yes, decorated. As a rule, the consumer can find a flash drive disguised as just about anything imaginable, as long as the size is right. The real key to pricing though is the performance. The going price for USB flash drives range from $10 for 2GB all the way up to $90 for 16GB. No matter what, people will be able to find a flash drive in their price range.