The Advantages of Flash Drives
Flash drives are becoming increasingly common today and can be seen on keychains and even necklaces. What is it about this technology that makes it so ubiquitous? As it turns out flash drives have a number of distinct advantages over other existing storage technologies, and each of these contributes a great deal to the product's success.
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Portable
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Flash drives are tiny, often fitting on a keychain. It is exactly this portability that has made the flash drive so commonplace. In the early days of the technology it was more compact than a floppy disc yet contained significantly more data. Today many flash drives easily edge out CDs and even DVDs for both portability and the amount of data one can fit on them.
No Moving Parts
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Unlike most internal computer hard drives and some external hard drives, flash drives have no moving parts inside them. This makes flash drives a great deal more durable than conventional hard drives, which make use of a moving head to write and read data that can be jammed when dropped. This is also no small part of why flash drives are so much smaller than conventional hard drives.
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Rewritable
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While some CDs and DVDs are rewritable, this is done on a disc-wide basis; that is, you cannot simply delete an individual file from a CD, nor can you simply add a single file without re-burning all data. A flash drive is portable in the sense that CDs and DVDs are, but is rewritable to a much greater extent---files can be created and deleted at will, much like on a conventional hard drive.
Fast
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Because of the lack of moving parts, flash drives are faster than both conventional hard drives and optical media such as CDs and DVDs. This makes flash drives ideal for quickly moving files onto and off of a computer, which is their main purpose today.
Increasingly Cheap
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As time goes on the cost of flash drives continues to decrease. In 2009, it's not uncommon to see 8 gigabyte drives for under $30, and prices are certain to drop as the technology improves. Perhaps at some point flash memory will, in addition to being the standard portable disc, replace internal hard drives completely. This will increase the durability of laptops and save space inside the unit.
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Comments
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Very portable. Love it.
