USB Pen Drive

A flash drive consists of a small protected inside a plastic, metal, or rubberised case, robust enough for carrying with no additional protection in a pocket or on a key chain, for example. The USB connector is protected by a removable cap or by retracting into the body of the drive, although it is not liable to be damaged if exposed. Most flash drives use a standard allowing plugging into a port on a personal computer

Nothing actually moves in a flash drive: the term drive persists because computers read and write flash-drive data using the same system commands as for a mechanical , with the storage appearing to the computer and as just another drive.

USB flash drives offer potential advantages over other portable storage devices, particularly the . They have a more compact shape, operate faster, hold much more data, have a more durable design, and operate more reliably due to their lack of moving parts. Additionally, it has become increasingly common for computers to ship without floppy disk drives. USB ports, on the other hand, appear on almost every mainstream PC and laptop. These types of drives use the standard, supported natively by modern operating systems such as , , , and other systems. USB drives with USB 2.0 support can also operate faster than an , while storing a larger amount of data in a much smaller space.

USB flash drives are typically removable and rewritable, much shorter than a (1 to 4 inches or 2.5 to 10 cm), and weigh less than 2 ounces (56 g). Storage capacities typically range from 64 MB to 64 GB with steady improvements in size and price per . Some allow 1 million write or erase cycles and have 10-year data retention, connected by or .

A USB flash drive consists of a NAND-type flash memory data storage device integrated with a USB interface.