Flash Drives advantages over other memory devices.

Advantages of a Flash Drive.....

Flash drives are nearly impervious to the scratches and dust that were problematic for previous forms of portable storage, such as compact discs and floppy disks, and their durable solid-state design means they often survive casual abuse. This makes them ideal for transporting personal data or work files from one location to another, such as from home to school or office or for carrying around personal data that the user typically wants to access in a variety of places. The near-ubiquity of USB support on modern computers means that such a drive will work in most places.

Flash drives are also a relatively dense form of storage, where even the cheapest will store dozens of floppy disks worth of data. Many can hold more data than a CD (703[12] MB). Top of the line flash drives can store more data than a DVD.

The power consumption of a typical flash drive is very low, much lower than that of the common alternative, the portable hard disk, due to there being no moving parts inside a flash drive.

Portable hard disks, on the other hand, require several motors or actuators to rotate the disk platter, and move the read / write head. Consequently, the USB flash drive need not be as big, or heavy, allowing greater portability.

Flash drives implement the USB mass storage device class, meaning that most modern operating systems can read and write to flash drives without any additional 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 whatever type of file system or block addressing scheme it wants. Some computers have the ability to boot up from flash drives.

Flash drives are much more tolerant of abuse than mechanical drives, but can still be damaged or have data corrupted by severe physical impacts. Improperly wired USB ports can also destroy the circuitry of a flash drive, a danger in home-built desktop PCs.

Some flash drives can retain their memory after being submerged in water even through a machine wash. 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.

So there you have it..........keep on learning.......:)