What is Pen Drive ?

A Pen-Drive, or a USB flash drive is a Portable data storage device. Pen Drives have replaced the floppy Drives of old and have become the most popular data storage devices among Consumers.

Pen Drive also referred as USB flash drive is a Portable device which allows user to transfer data (text, image, videos etc) to and from computer quickly. User can easily read and write the data on the Pen Drive by Plugging it into the USB port on the computer. Pen Drive are quite compact and can fit easily into the pocket, they run without battery and draw power from the USB connection itself.

Both Floppy disks and CDs are now being gradually replaced by Pen Drive as a preferred means of data storage. it is because Pen-Drive offers mass data transfer and storage capability at a much faster rate and easy to plug in and plug out.

 

Storage capacity of the Pen Drive can very from few megabytes to over 100 GB. Nowadays even external hard drives are available in the market with connected to a USB port on the computer.

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Characteristics of Pen Drive

Characteristics of Pen Drive  :-

1. These are very fast device for data transfer.
2. These are Plug and Play USB devices. It means, Pen Devices need not be installed.
3. Pen Drive has high capacity of data storage. Its Capacity range from 128 MB data to 8 GB and increasing day by data as the technology changes.
4. This is very portable and small in size with large capacity.
5. This is easy erasable and rewritable device. These are advantageous over CDs as these are rewritable and erasable.

Architecture : Pen-Drive Consists of an electronic circuit board and a USB connector, connects the drive to the computer. PenDrive also known as a Flash memory is an example of NAND style storage device. it is a memory chip which holds the data. Most Pen Drives are covered with plastic, metal or rubber casing for insulation.

 

Advantages : Pen Drives are robust and scratch free thus ensuring maximum security for our data as compared to other traditional means of data storage. Many available PC software suites permit the launch of an operating system from the bootable Pen-Drive. Moreover companies selling Pen Drive nowadays also couple it with other devices like MP3 music player, LED’s or Swiss Knife etc.

An increasingly popular direct access secondary storage medium for micro and minicomputer system is the PenDrive. A PenDrive is a removable, round, flat piece of Mylar Plastic, Coated with ferric oxide and encased in a protective plastic cover. This kind of disk is read and written by a floppy disk drive, which is a drive that perform the basic operation on a disk, including rotating the disk, reading and writing data onto the disk.

The PenDrive read/write head alters the magnetic orientation of the particles, where orientation in one direction represents ‘1’ and orientation in the other represents binary ‘0’

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