Usb pen drives are a far relative to the old EEPROM technology but due to clever controller circuits modern flash drives are a really convenient way of storing and moving considerable amounts of data. Recent flash drives are mainly connecting to USB 2.0 interface, but there are versions with other connectors as well. Most notable deviation is the FireWire Flash drive, which is kind of an abomination by itself.

There are two kinds of FireWire connectors, the firewire 400 and the firewire 800. Both are only compatible with themselves, so a firewire 400 device will not work in a 800 port and vice versa. There are flash drives utilizing the eSata interface. Most of the recent motherboards are compatible with eSata, but since these are designed to connect hard disks to the motherboard, there is no notable power going through the port itself, because external hard drives are supposed to have their own power supplies. An eSata flash drive therefore has to drain power from somewhere else, and while the port is a little bit faster than USB 2.0, the device still has to use a free USB port for the power.

First flash drives were released in early 2000 and were 8MB in capacity. They quickly acquired a good market penetration thanks to the competition at the time. When the first flash drives came out, the only cheap media to move data between computers was the floppy disk, and with 1.44MB each it was not hard to surpass.

Nowadays the most often sought after USB flash drives are the 2GB, 4GB, 8GB and 16GB versions. There is a rather important negative side to 4GB and lower capacity thumb drives though. After the era of CD on the writable media market DVD superseded it with its 4.5GB capacity and became the de-facto standard to store high definition movie films and as such posed a natural limit to software releases as well. 4GB and smaller capacity flash drives are unable to store a whole DVD and it makes uncomfortable to deliver these files on such a device.

For that very matter 8GB and bigger capacity devices are now in use, though 8GB is still the most popular, because it is the smallest of the capacity range that is able to store a whole DVD on its own. 16GB pendrives are not that common and I suspect they won’t be until Blu-Ray reaches the market saturation of the DVD-R.

4GB pen drives are relatively cheap and easy to buy, any webshop dealing with electronic devices will most probably hold a few dozen different kinds. Some have a write-lock, some are even securable with biometrics – fingerprint -, but the most often sought after function is undoubtedly the transfer speed. OCZ prides itself to manufacture one of the fastest flash drives, so looking at their portfolio will give a clear view of how the market looks like in the high-speed league.

USB storage devices are the storage of the decade and everyone moving files regularly should at least think about getting one