USB Flash Drive & Memory Stick Article

A USB flash drive or USB memory stick as they are more often know offer perhaps the easiest way to back and transport data.
These incredibly portable memory sticks simply plug into the USB port of any pc.

If your running windows 2000,XP or Vista then the operating system already has USB memory stick compatibility built in, this means no drivers needed, simply plug-in, wait a few seconds and hay presto you now have a fully functional drive which can be accessed through my computer. There can be a lot of confusion with USB memory sticks as they have so many different names, but in essence they are all the same. Names include USB sticks , USB Drive , USB Flash drive , flash stick , thumb drive , USB memory stick & thumb drive .

Many of the names above only based loosely when it comes to the accuracy of the actual drive, but they all are same and do the same thing.
The Physical size
This can be as small as about and inch and up to around 3 inches for the larger and usually older types, some of them come with the ability to put them onto a keychain which is very useful, but make sure they are not going to be squashed too much. Although USB flash drives are robust they can still be broken if not looked after.

USB memory sticks come in various sizes
They can be as small as 16mb for the much older types and as large as around 6gb at the time of writing this article.

For some of the larger ones though you’ll need to have a USB adapter as many are simply flash memory card and require an adapter to be able to connect to a USB port. If you need something with even more capacity checkout our external hard drive article below, where we advise on various other portable solutions.

The Price
How much does a USB memory stick cost ? This really depends on the size, for a 16mb USB stick it will be only a few dollars, for a newer drive you could be looking at around $120 dollars for a 4gb drive, but looking around good deals can be had on the USB flash drives in the range of 1 to 2gb.

Conclusion
The USB memory stick is a good way to backup data, but it’s not considered the best way, although 6gb may sound like a lot of storage, this will get filled up quickly and you only get one backup.
Other solutions such as tapes or DVD’s means you can have a cycle of backups as opposed to carrying all your eggs in one basket so to speak.

NOTE
If your pc or laptop only has USB type 1 ports then the data transfer rates to a USB memory stick will be relatively slow. Make sure that your pc or laptop has USB type 2 ports which are around 9 times faster. If you don’t have USB type 2 ports you can upgrade by adding a USB 2 card to either a pc or laptop, checkout our USB guides

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