USB flash drives are small storage media that can be read, written and re-written through a common USB port by a standard home computer without the use of other devices. These drives are usually really small, their nickname thumb drive comes from the fact that some older drives were the size and shape of an adult male thumb and the first 8mb drive produced in 2000 was also called ThumbDrive. Recently flash drives the size of a smaller coin became available and are similarly priced to bigger drives and therefore their share of market is expected to raise during 2010.

Flash drives use rewritable memory chips, that are called EEPROM. It is a relatively slow technology, but smart controller chips speed things up a little. Operating systems write the drive like if it was a hard disk, and the controller takes it from there and decides where data gets actually stored. This chip allows multiple parts of a memory to be written at any time and this parallel access multiplies the read and write speeds of the actual EEPROM.

In 2010 the expected maximum storage available on an USB pendrive(again a name referring to former shape and size) is 256 gigabytes, however the average size remains to be 4, 8 or 16 Gigabytes. A 8Gb flash drive has a distinctive advantage over all those sizes though. A normal, one sided DVD-R optical disk can take up to 4.5-4.7 gigabytes of data and is commonly used to distribute software that exceeds 650 megabytes size of a CD. 4GB drives are unable to hold a whole DVD worth of data and as such are unable to transfer a HD quality movie in one piece.

A 16 Gb USB flash drive of course can take a DVD, 3 of them even, but in most cases there is only one DVD to be transferred between computers and therefore it is extra money paid for a service that is most probably unnecessary. 8Gb flash drives however are perfect in this sense as they’re the smallest and cheapest of the bunch that can take a whole DVD in one piece. Until Blu-ray reaches the market penetration of DVD disks, it’s highly unlikely that USB drives with higher capacity will produce significantly better sale figures.

Memory2go, a common OEM manufacturer of these drives offers its 8gb drive for $21 each, while a more premium product a 8gb Kingston DataTraveler is only slightly more expensive at $23.