Difference Between Flash Drive and Thumb Drive

Flash Drive vs Thumb Drive

This is the age of computers and internet, and even if you do not have any truck with computers and related technology, you need to be aware of accessories connected with computers. How do you take files from the computer in your office back to your home? Did you say pen drive? Of course you do. It is a storage device that has made life easier for all individuals around the world as they can use it to not just carry files from one place to another in a portable device that is as small as a keychain, but also to share files with others anytime and place they wish. These portable storage devices are termed flash drives or thumb drives. But, are they the same, or is there any difference between a flash drive and a thumb drive? Let us find out in this article.

It was way back in 1988 that world’s first thumb drive was introduced by IBM. It gave the world liberty from having to keep lots of Floppy Discs that also had little storage space. This portable device has today become so popular that every individual has one or more thumb drives for personal use. Some people refer to these portable devices as flash drives. These drives, whether called flash or thumb, allow easy sharing and transfer of files from one computer to another. In fact, in this age of digital devices, these pen drives or thumb drives or flash drives have become almost necessary to store and carry media files or information from one place to another.

These storage devices make use of Universal Serial Bus (USB) for storage and the reason why they are referred to as flash drives is because of the nature of their memory which is a type of flash memory. There are no moving parts in these portable memory devices unlike hard drives that have moving parts, and thus remain attached to the computer. These flash drives are nothing less than revolution as being stationary; they are being utilized as stick memory in even video game devices and digital cameras.

Unlike CD’s and the earlier floppy discs, thumb drives and flash drives have a large storage space and one can have them starting with 1 GB of storage space (earlier you could get 128 MB drives). Today there are 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB, and even 16 GB of such drives easily available in the market allowing one to store much more than he could store in CD’s and even DVD’s. What makes these thumb and flash drives great is their ability to be rewritten as many times as one wishes. They are not easily damaged which is the main problem with CD’s that get scratched easily and also break upon a fall. All computers recognize such flash or thumb drives and once one inserts them in USB port of the CPU, the data in the computer can be stored in these drives and the files in such drives can also be sent to computers.