Ever wonder how a USB Flash Drive is made? Join us on a tour of the Kingston Manufacturing Plant and learn how the they produce it and gets packaged.
A USB flash drive consists of a NAND-type flash memory data storage device integrated with a USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface. USB flash drives are typically removable and rewritable, much smaller than a floppy disk, and most weigh less than an ounce (30 g). Storage capacities can range from 64 MB to 256 GB with steady improvements in size and price per capacity. Some allow 1 million write or erase cycles and have 10-year data retention, connected by USB 1.1 or USB 2.0.
USB flash drives offer potential advantages over other portable storage devices, particularly the floppy disk. They have a more compact shape, operate faster, hold much more data, have a more durable design, and operate more reliably due to their lack of moving parts. Additionally, it has become increasingly common for computers to be sold without floppy disk drives. USB ports, on the other hand, appear on almost every current[update] mainstream PC and laptop. These types of drives use the USB mass storage standard, supported natively by modern operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix-like systems. USB drives with USB 2.0 support can also operate faster than an optical disc drive, while storing a larger amount of data in a much smaller space.