Flash disks hardly let water or dust seep in or get scratched, which were serious problems in older portable storage devices (e.g. CD-ROMs, floppy disks), etc. And the solid-state storage design used in flash drives allows them to resist unintentional external impacts. These advantages make flash drives ideal for carrying personal data or work files from one place to another, such as from home to school or the office, or generally to various locations where personal data needs to be carried to and accessed. Since USB is almost ubiquitous in today's personal computers, flash drives are available everywhere. However, the small size of flash drives also means that they are often misplaced, forgotten or lost.
Flash drives may be small, but they have a relatively large storage capacity. Early flash drives had a small capacity, storing only 16-32M files, and even then, they were equivalent to 10-20 times the capacity of floppy disks, a common rewritable removable storage medium at the time. With the development of technology, the capacity of USB flash drive also increased rapidly according to Moore's Law. By 2012, the 4G capacity USB flash drive has been basically on the verge of elimination, the mainstream USB flash drive capacity developed to 8-16G, equivalent to 2-4 DVD disc capacity. The maximum capacity has reached 1T, equivalent to the capacity of more than 240 DVD discs.
Flash drives use the USB mass storage device category, which means that most modern operating systems can read and write to flash drives without the need for a separate driver installation. Flash disks are displayed inside the operating system as logical units in blocks, hiding the complex details required for internal flash memory. The operating system can use any file system or block addressing method. It is also possible to create a boot USB drive to boot the computer.
Like other flash memory devices, flash drives have limits on the total number of reads and writes. A mid-range flash drive can read and write hundreds of thousands of times under normal use, but when the flash drive gets old, the writing process can be more time consuming. When we use flash drives to run applications or operating systems, we can't help but consider this. Some developers have written special versions of operating systems (e.g. Linux) or applications (e.g. Mozilla Firefox) for flash drives to address this feature and the capacity limitations. They are often optimized for space usage and store the staging disk in the computer's main memory rather than on the flash drive.
Many flash drives support a write-protect mechanism. This switch on the casing prevents the computer from writing or modifying the data on the disk. Write protection prevents computer virus files from being written to the flash drive to prevent the spread of that virus. A flash drive without write protection becomes a way for multiple viruses to spread with features such as autorun.
Flash drives are more tolerant of external impacts than mechanical disks, but can still fail or lose data due to severe physical damage. Incorrect wiring of the USB connection port in an assembled computer can also damage the flash drive's circuitry.
