Overview of USB flash drives
USB flash drives are good for people who need portable file storage. USB flash drives offer several advantages over alternative devices like floppy disks.
USB Flash Drives
USB flash drives are small file storage devices about the size of your thumb—in fact, flash drives are sometimes known as thumb drives (they are also sometimes called zip drives). USB flash drives are portable, and they let you store lots of files. They are ideal for students, faculty, and staff who need to access files on different computers (i.e at home, in the lab, in your office, etc.).Advantages of USB Flash Drives
USB flash drives offer several advantages over alternative devices.- Better than burnable CDs: USB flash drives are more compact and portable than optical storage devices, like burnable CD-R and DVD-R discs. Plus, if a burned CD or DVD gets scratched, it might be ruined—this isn't a risk for USB flash drives. Also, you can add and remove files from a USB flash drive as often as you want, unlike many burnable discs which can only be written to once.
- Better than floppy disks: USB flash drives are faster and can hold a lot more data than floppy disks. Floppy disks are notorious for losing data and corruption, an annoyance that is typically not associated with USB flash drives. Floppy disks are a dying breed, and many new computers don't even ship with floppy disks. Flash drives require that the computer has a USB port, something that's a standard on virtually all new computers.
- Better than external hard drives: External hard drives are best suited for back up and storage of large amounts of data, up to several hundred GBs. USB flash drives are substantially smaller and because they have no moving parts, tend to be more durable than hard drive solutions.
- Better than emailing files: Emailing files as a way of transferring them from one computer to another is cumbersome. The size limit on email attachments (20MB at ISU) may even prevent you from emailing larger files, whereas flash drives are easy to use and offer larger capacity. Plus, copying files off of a flash drive is much faster than downloading the files as email attachments.
Using a USB Flash Drive
To use a USB flash drive, plug it into a USB slot on your computer. Your computer will automatically recognize it and will add it to the list of drives. You can use a USB flash drive just like any other drive. Copy and paste files onto (or off of ) the flash drive. You should always keep a backup copy of files on your computer too.When you remove the USB flash drive from your computer, use the proper method. On Windows, click the USB icon in your system tray (next to your clock) and select Safely Remove Hardware. On a Mac, select the drive and click File > Eject.