USB flash drives these days are gaining popularity over CDs/DVDs since they are fast in terms of data transfer, have a fairly large capacity, looks attractive, reliable and very portable. The first thing which comes to our mind when we think of USB drives is data storage devices but what they can offer is much more than just storing data.
The speed at which we can operate USB drives and the amount of storage they offer is the key by which they stand out of the other data storage devices like hard disk, CD/DVDs etc. It has no moving part like in hard disk. They more durable than optical media as the latter is prone to scratches on it surface.
Uses of USB flash drives
Storing Data
The basic use of a USB flash drive is storing data. The data transfer is fastest in a flash drive and they also offer decent storage capacities at reasonable prices.
Booting your PC
Almost every motherboard these days gives an option to boot from flash drives. Booting from pen drives can help you troubleshoot your OS(operating System). You can install a portable version of a OS like linux, vortex in the drive and run it whenever needed.
Print Documents and Photos
Nowadays printers provide you the facility to print documents and photos by inserting the drive in the USB ports in the printer itself.
Carrying your Software Application with you
It is a very nice application in which you can carry certain portable softwares with you. These can be the softwares you are very much familiar with and want to use it on every computer you work on. Application like filezilla, Word processors like Open office can installed on the flash drives for use on alien systems.
Boosting the performance of your PC
Microsoft Widows Vista and Windows 7 came up with a feature called readyboost in which it makes the flash drive a secondary cache memory so as to boost the performance of the system. But flash drive used for readyboost should have storage capacity equal to or more than your RAM.
Locking your PC
You can use the USB drive as a lock to your computer. Until you insert the flash drive your computer will retain its lock on it.
What’s the best use of USB drive according to you?
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You are right that USB really hit the popularity. We even can run a OS (Linux) from it which can be very helpful when we use a shared computer.
We can even load a OS from USB which is very helpful when use a shared computer.
no doubt the usages of USB are numerous
anybody know the maximum storage capacity available in usb?
well i heard of 256 gb flash drive earlier in 2010
Nowadays USB are more than just a storage. Your article explains this very clearly. Nice post. Thanks for sharing the knowledge.
You have missed one use of it, now a days softwares like Predator are developed which are used to protect pc’s and lappy’s via usb drive…by this i mean that the usb functions as the password to the computer without it one can not log in to the system.
Use of USB:
To transport personal data
Repairing computer
System administrators’ helper
As an application carrier
As audio players
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