USB Thumb Drives

If you are a computer user, even moderately, chances are either you own at least one or have heard about “flash drives”. They are also knows an thumb drives or USB sticks. The latter attests to the method in which these marvelous devices are connected to the computers. In fact, thumb drives are also used to provide external and portable storage to devices that are not traditionally considered computers: things like modern digital TVs, game consoles, and network-connected storage devices called NAS.

Just what are these thumb drives and why are they called thumb drives? Well, the answer is pretty obvious when you see one or hold it in your hand. They are the current superstars of simple and convenient portable storage that you can carry with you in your pockets or purses. They even can be worn like pendants or small enough to hang on your keychains. These are great tech gifts because of their low cost, usefulness, universal compatibility, and can be molded into all kinds of interesting novelty shapes like a human thumb. Some are so small that they virtually disappear into the USB slot. As such, these tiny drives are great for the tablets that have a full-size USB port. 

To use it, you would simply plug one of these drives into the USB port of your computer. After the computer has recognized the drive and as in a Windows PC machine, assigns it a drive letter, it is ready for use.The process only takes a few seconds. No need to install any special hardware because all computers these days have at least one USB port. All widely used computer types like the Macs and PCs recognize these drives automatically. Also, the USB connector on the computer provides the power to the these drives as well. Sometimes you would see a light that comes on when these drives are properly connected to the computer. On a Mac, the thumbdrive would appear as a white-colored icon on the desktop. More recent versions of the Mac system does not display the icons of these drives on the desktop by default. However, you can easily configure your Mac to do so quite easily.

So what are these thumb drives used for? They are used for two primary purposes. First as external portable storage that you can use to keep second copies of important data files as backups in case the primary files are lost. As said, once the computer has recognized the drive and presented it with an icon or drive letter, it's a simple matter of copy and paste the files you want to backup.

The second use of these thumb drives is to transport files from one computer to another, even between Macs and PCs. People often use the local network or the Internet to send files to themselves or others, but sometimes either the network is not available or the files are simply too large to be transmitted this way. Therefore, people would just dump these files onto their thumb drives and re-connect them to the other machine and drag the files out of the drives. It was the old “sneaker net” with those floppy disks except this time, the amount of data that can be transferred is much bigger and the read and write speed from the drives is much faster.

Just how much data can one of these drives contain? The cost of these drives is proportional to their capacity and to a lesser extend their data transfer speed. When these drives first came out 15 years ago, their capacities were 256MB (megabytes) and 512MB. This was a marvel in technology in those days considered floppies were still popular at that time because a typical floppy can store a meager 1.44MB of data! Also, a floppy disk needs a floppy drive to work. These days, you can buy a 8GB (gigabyte) thumb drive for around $10. Capacity wise, they come in other flavors of 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB. There are even higher capacities, but their cost is prohibitive. Incidentally, 1GB is 1000MB. So a 16GB thumb drive has the storage capacity of around 11,000 floppies!

The data transfer speed in and out of these thumb drives depends on the maximum theoretical speed of the USB port and the quality of the storage chip inside the thumb drive. Some of these chips can move data faster than other lower quality chips, but none of them can transfer faster than the theoretical maximum speed of the USB connector on the computer. There are 3 versions of USB. Version 1 runs at 10mbps (megabit per second). Version 2 (the current standard in most computers) runs at 480 mbps. The latest USB3 runs at a whopping 4.8 gbps, ten times faster than USB2. USB3 ports on the computer are backward compatible so you don’t have to throw away all those USB2 thumb drives. If you get a USB3 thumb drive anyway, you should get one that has the faster chip to take advantage of the USB3 port speed. You can get a so-called SSD-on-a-stick USB3 thumb drive and experience the amazing speed boost when used on a USB3 ports . Incidentally, USB3 thumb drives will work with USB2 ports on the computer. The U in USB stands for "universal" for a reason.

So when presented with a myriad array of thumb drives at the store, how to pick the right thumb drive? Fortunately, the technology of thumb drives have matured enough that even the cheaper models mostly work just as well as the more expensive ones. I have always picked the cheapest thumb drives and so far no problem with any of them. However, there are other little things you should keep in mind. There are thumb drives that for some reason have their casing wide enough that when plugged into a USB port on the computer, its girth prevents the insertion of another USB plug next to it. You should avoid buying these thumb drives. On the left are drives with a slender casing and one that does not. Other than the slender frame of the thumb drive, I also recommend that you buy a drive that has an indicator light on it. The flickering of this light tells you that there is data going through the drive. Therefore, do not yank it off the computer when it is doing the data transfer.

One thing that drives me crazy with some drives. Some of them contain pre-existing “helper” programs. Once plugged into to the computer, these programs launch themselves and offer a variety of features like pre-made folders for music and pictures. Some even offer encryption for the data stored on the drives. The problem with these programs is if you do not have user administrative rights to the computer that you plug the drives into, you cannot use these programs, and therefore, you have no access to the data that were successfully copied over from the previous computer where you did have admin rights. Unless you need these specific features, do not buy drives that include them. Basically you just want to use a dumb drive that all it does is offer external portable storage. For some of these drives with pre-loaded programs, you can completely remove them. However, I have encountered drives where these programs cannot be removed. So it’s best simply to avoid all of them just in case.

If you want restricted access for the data stored on these thumb drives, there are better and more standardized ways to do so. One would be creating password-protected folders with free programs like 7zip. To unzip such a folder does not require administrator privileges. Some thumb drives literally have a thumb scanner on its encasing. A little search on the Web may yield such a drive that has all of its finger scanning and authentication executed from within the drive, making running of a program on the target computer to offer access to the drive unnecessary.

Lastly, not all thumb drives come with the USB connector. A few drives come with firewire or eSATA connectors. Firewire and eSATA thumb drives obviously require a firewire and eSATA ports on the computer to work, respectively. While these non-USB thumb drives offer faster speeds, the extra speeds do not warrant your buying them because not all computers have firewire or eSATA ports. Given the whole point of having a thumb drive is portability, it defeats the purpose. Buying USB3 thumb drives make more sense because they can be used with any of the ubiquitous USB ports on the computers.  

I leave you with one of my favorite novelty USB drives. Actually, this is technically not a drive because they do not have any storage capacity but given that the USB port also provides power to the "drive", use your imagination as to what the dog will do when plugged into a powered USB port.