Online @ LLC > Tutorials > Flash Drives > What is a flash drive?
What is a Flash Drive?
Flash drives, which also may be called jump drives, pen drives, or thumb drives, are small flash memory drives with a USB (Universal Serial Bus) connection. Most computers have at least two USB ports which are typically located in the back of the computer tower or on the sides of a laptop computer. Some computers will have USB ports located on the front of the computer tower which is the case for all lab computers on Lake Land College campuses. Flash drives can hold from 64 MB to upwards of 2GIG of data. The 64 MB flash drive can store data equal to that of approximately 44 floppy disks. This makes flash drives much more convenient to carry from home to school than floppies or zip disks. Flash drives are read and write disks which means you can open (read) and save (write) files to the disk. It is important to remember that while flash drives are more reliable than floppy disks, they are not fail safe. Back-up data stored on flash drives often by copying the files to your computer’s (C.) drive or burning the files to a CD.