the.com/flash drive
A keychain that outlived three laptops and all your trust in the cloud.
means A small portable device that stores digital data on flash memory, plugged into a computer's USB port to move or back up files.
from 'Flash' comes from flash memory itself, a type of rewritable, non-volatile storage invented at Toshiba in the 1980s — the name reportedly chosen because erasing its memory blocks happened in a quick, all-at-once 'flash,' unlike older chip-by-chip erasure. 'Drive' is the older computing habit of calling any storage device a drive, a holdover from spinning hard disk drives even though flash drives have no moving parts at all.
- capacity irony
- smaller ones now cost more per gigabyte
- longevity
- data can fade after about ten years unused
- eject ritual
- safely removing it is mostly superstition
- origin
- commercialized by IBM and M-Systems in 2000