Difference Between Flash Drive and Pen Drive

Flash Drive vs Pen Drive
 

Flash memory is a memory technology developed from the solid state circuits and has the ability to retain information even after power is disconnected to the drive. They have become very common and have replaced many of the memory technologies due to their capacity and performance.

Flash Drive

In general terms, a memory device using a flash memory can be called a flash drive. Flash memory is an electronic nonvolatile storage device in computers, which can be programmed and erased electronically. They are solid state devices built using integrated circuits.

Flash drives are developments from EEPROM technology, and they can be constructed using either NOR or NAND logic. The characteristics of flash memory are primarily affected by the type of logic gates employed in the construction.

Often two types of devices are generally called as flash drives, and both employ flash memory. Solid State Drives or SSDs are data storage devices to store data persistent, and store large amounts of data. They can be used in place of the conventional secondary storage devices. Compared to HDDs, Solid State Drives are quieter and less affected by physical shock. They are also faster than the HDDs. The other type is the USB flash drive, which will be discussed in the next section.

Apart from the SSD, a wide range of memory devices are called flash drive, and they all use flash memory elements. Compact Flash card (CF), CFast card, Multimedia Card (MMC), Secure Digital card (SD, SDHC, SDXC), Smart Media card (SM), XQD card (XQD) and xD Picture Card (xD) are those devices. They can be found in mobile phones, digital camera, to high performance graphics cards.

Pen Drive

Pen drives or Memory sticks are flash memory module that can be used for transferring data. These drives are connected to the computers using a USB connector (not a separate connector; connector on the drive itself); therefore, often called USB drives too. Phison developed a removable data storage device which they named “pen drive” in 2001. Since then, all the USB flash drives are commonly called as pen drives.

They come in a wide range of capacities, ranging from 1 – 32 GB on average, but higher capacity drives are also available. Due to the convenience of usage, pen drives have replaced most of the other portable media, and has become the most predominant form for carrying data.

What is the difference between Flash Drive and Pen Drive?

• Flash drives are memory devices using integrated circuits and have no moving parts relevant to the operation. They are read and written electronically.

• Flash drive in general can be used either for SSD (Solid State Drives) or USB Flash Drives.

• SSDs have a much larger capacity and can be used instead of the HDDs while pen drive are used for data carrying purposes.