ABSTRACT
The universal serial bus (USB) flash drive, aka a “thumb drive” or a “memory stick,” is a revolutionary memory toy. The first flash drive did not come on the market until 2000, and only in the past few years have flash drives become truly indispensable and ubiquitous to everyday life. USB flash drives are actually nand-type flash-memory data-storage devices integrated with a USB connector. An IBM invention disclosure by Shmueli et al. appears to actually be the earliest known document to describe a flash drive. USB flash drives are small, lightweight, portable, and instantly rewritable; and they offer major advantages over other portable memory storage devices such as floppy disks and compact discs. The end of the USB connector protrudes from the flash drive, and it is protected either with a removable cap or by retracting it into the body of the drive. Hard disk drives are nonvolatile memory devices.
