Flash drives

Flash drive speeds and sizes

Flash memory was invented by Dr. Fujio Masuoka while working for Toshiba in 1984. According to Toshiba, the name 'Flash' was suggested by Dr. Masuoka's colleague, Mr. Shoji Ariizumi, because the erasure process of the memory contents reminded him of a flash of a camera.

Flash memory is non-volatile, which means that it does not need power to maintain the information stored in the chip.

Flash memory cards are available in different speeds, specified by the manufacturer on the packaging. Faster drives and cards usually costs a little more and it is worth spending the little extra.

Write rates for flash drives are around 30MB/s and fetch rates at about 50MP/s. Not too sloppy. But keep in mind that a flash drive has a limited life span, to about one million write/erase cycles.

The biggest flash drive to date was enveiled by Samsung in March 2006: it stores a cool 32GB.

HT: Wikipedia

Flash drives Kingston 4GB R65 Kingston 8GB R99 Kingston 16GB R230

Flash drives Kingmax 8GB R99