Prepared by: Fatma alasy Supervised by: Mr. Ahmed Abu mosameh

Definition: A flash drive is a small, ultra-portable storage device which, unlike a hard drive or optical drive, has no moving parts. Most connect to the PC via a built-in USB port. Storage capacity ranges from as small as 16MB to as much as 64GB and more.hard driveoptical driveUSB

The first USB flash drive was manufactured in early 2000 by a company called Trek with product Thumbkey®, shortly followed by M-systems (now SanDisk) with their DiskonKey® drive. Many companies claim to have been first to develop the USB Flash drive which resulted in many patent disputes over the years. With time USB flash drives have taken on other forms than the classic memory stick and have been integrated into USB pens and USB mouse or have been integrated into creative casings of customised USB drives.

Before Flash Prior to USB drives, it was difficult and inconvenient to move large amounts of data from place to place. CD-writing technology was almost unavailable on personal computers until the late 1990s; the largest commonly-available portable storage media were floppy disks that could at best hold 1.44 megabytes. Large files (over 1.44 MB) had to be split up across many floppy disks, or put on expensive and rarely-compatible high-density disks, such as Zip disks. Those required special, expensive hardware, which limited their popularity

*Adoption is widespread as the cost for USB drives has dramatically decreased and are now a very cost effective way to easily store and transport data files. These data files can be of any sort ranging from simple text to audio over to picture and video files. *USB Flash drives, also known as USB pen drives and Memory sticks are increasingly common in the world and the digital storage device of choice.

1. Open My Computer and see which drives are shown. Most computers, for example, have a hard disk such as a C: drive and a few removable storage devices such as a floppy drive, a CD-ROM drive, and perhaps a zip drive.

*Insert the flash drive into the USB port and watch to see where the USB flash drive appears. Most will appear as removable storage, but some will instead appear as hard drives. Note the name Windows is using to refer to the flash drive ("Removable Disk (G:)," for example).

3. Open My Documents or the location from which you want to transfer files to the flash drive. Select the files or folders you want to save to the flash drive by leftclicking on them. To select more than one, hold down the CTRL key while you click and select all of the files you wish to save.

4. Right-click on the file(s) or folder(s) you selected, then select Send to, then select the name you saw appearing in My Computer for the flash drive ("Removable Disk (G:)," for example).

5. When the copying is finished, do not immediately remove the flash drive from the USB port. Instead, left-click on the Remove Hardware icon located in the System Tray. A window containing a list of the USB devices will appear. Left-click on the Safely Remove Mass Storage Device line that matches your flash drive (for example, Safely Remove Mass Storage Device - Drive(G:)).

6. When you see the following message appear in the bottom left toolbar, it is, as it says, safe to remove the flash drive from the USB port; you may close the message or ignore it, as it will close itself automatically

Kingston Flash SanDisk Flash Transcend Flash Corsair Flash Imation Flash Sony Flash LG Flash Memorex Flash Crucial Flash Patriot Flash OCZFlash

64MB 128MB 256MB 512MB 1GB 2GB 4GB 8GB 16GB 64 GB

USB flash drives based on Universal Service Bus technology are miniature, inexpensive data storage devices. These portable devices have emerged as the storage device of choice for millions of users and have replaced the floppy drives of earlier computing eras. The many functions and usage possibilities of USB drives have elevated their importance as important computer peripheral devices

* The most part is what is called Ballodr (Loader) which contains: 1 - all the information for components of the motherboard device and maps nutrition Electrical them. 2 - tracks flow of data between various parts related to the motherboard. 3 - information necessary for the port for connecting to your computer in order to make this connection.

*USB ports are much more common than CD and especially DVD burners, so USB Flash Drives will work with more computers than a CD-Rs or DVD-Rs. Also, the process of uploading files from your computer to a USB Flash Drive is much faster and simpler than burning a CD or DVD.USB Flash Drives *Additionally, USB Flash Drives act like portable hard drives to which you can add and delete files as many times as you like. With CD-Rs and DVD- Rs, you can only add data once, and you can't remove data once it's burned onto the disc

*Data stored on flash drives are impervious to scratches and dust, and flash drives are mechanically very robust making them suitable for transporting data from place to place and keeping it readily at hand. Most personal computers support USB as of 2009[update]. *Flash drives also store data densely compared to many removable media. In mid-2009, 256 GB drives became available, with the ability to hold many times more data than a DVD. *Compared to hard drives, flash drives use little power, have no fragile moving parts, and for low capacities are small and light.

Flash drives implement the USB mass storage device class so that most modern operating systems can read and write to them without installing device drivers. The flash drives present a simple block- structured logical unit to the host operating system, hiding the individual complex implementation details of the various underlying flash memory devices. The operating system can use any file system or block addressing scheme. Some computers can boot up from flash drives.

Some flash drives retain their memory even after being submerged in water [21], even through a machine wash, although this is not a design feature and not to be relied upon. Leaving the flash drive out to dry completely before allowing current to run through it has been known to result in a working drive with no future problems. Channel Five's Gadget Show cooked a flash drive with propane, froze it with dry ice, submerged it in various acidic liquids, ran over it with a jeep and fired it against a wall with a mortar. A company specializing in recovering lost data from computer drives managed to recover all the data on the drive. [22] All data on the other removable storage devices tested, using optical or magnetic technologies, were destroyed.

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