the.com/flashdrive
a thumb-sized vault that smuggles your whole life past airport security
means A small, portable storage device that plugs into a USB port and holds digital files on flash memory, no moving parts required.
from A compound of "flash" and "drive." The "flash" comes from flash memory, a type of chip invented in the 1980s — reportedly nicknamed "flash" because erasing its contents reminded an engineer of a camera flash going off, wiping a whole block in an instant. "Drive" is borrowed from the older world of spinning disk drives, even though a flash drive has nothing to spin; the word simply stuck as shorthand for "thing the computer stores data on." So the name fuses a chip that erases in a blink with a metaphor for machinery that no longer turns.
- origin
- Invented in the late 1990s, killed the floppy
- capacity
- Now holds more than 2,000 full CDs
- durability
- No moving parts, survives most drops
- sneaky use
- Stuxnet hit Iran's nuclear plant via USB
- limit
- Memory cells wear out after countless rewrites
kingston datatraveler — world's best-selling usb flash drive brand with over 2 billion units sold since 2000
sandisk cruzer — sandisk's flagship consumer flash drive, introduced in 2005 and continuously updated
corsair voyager — gaming-focused flash drive line by corsair, popular for fast data transfer speeds