Wednesday, 20 January 2021

Flash Drive or Pen Drive and Memory Cards

 

Flash Drive / Pen Drive:

 

Flash drive is a compact device of the size of a pen, comes in various shapes and stylish designs and may have different added features (such as with camera, with a built in MP3/WMA/FM Radio play back for music on the go, etc.). It enables easy transport of data from one computer to another.

 

It is a plug and play device that simply plugs into a USB (Universal Serial Bus) port of a computer. The computer detects it automatically as a removable drive. Now one can read, write, copy, delete and move data from the computer's hard disk drive to the flash drive or vice versa.  One can even run applications, view videos, or play MP3 files from it directly.

 

A flash drive does not require any battery, cable, or software, and is compatible with most PCs, desktop and laptop computers with USB 2.0 port. All these features make it ideal external data storage for mobile people to carry or transfer data from one computer to another.


A typical pen drive


As the name implies, it is based on flash memory storage technology. Flash memory is a non-volatile, EEPROM chip. It is highly durable solid-state storage having data retention capability of more than ten years. Available storage capacities are 8MB - 128 GB.

 

 

Memory Card (SD/MMC):

 

Similar to a flash drive, flash memory based cards are available as removable storage device in different types of electronic equipment. Some of the most popular ones are Secure Digital (SD) and Multimedia Card (MMC). Some other manufacturers have their own proprietary cards based on flash memory. Storage capacity of these cards range from 8MB - 6GB.

 

In addition to computers, these cards are used in various types of digital devices such as digital camera and cell phone. This also facilitates easy transfer of data from these devices to a computer for storage in the computer’s hard disk for further processing by the computer.


A typical memory card



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