Last week, when I went out to buy a new keyboard, I found some creative USB 2.0 flash drives. The one that attracted me at first sight looks like a part of bamboo also made of bamboo. The 4G flash drive feels very good but does cost much, so I think it may be made in China and bought it finally among lots of other flash drives. To be frank, I have been using flash drive early since it was released on the market. As you know, a flash drive is equivalent to the floppy disk, which is more portable and compatible indeed. Well, USB stick, USB pen, pen drive, jump drive, USB, and memory stick all refer to flash drive. This little item can store much information and data and much more durable than you can imagine. As a matter of fact, it is a mix of old and new. Older data storage technology, combined with modern microprocessor advancements has lead to a cheap, low power data storage medium. Because of its low cost and convenience it has become a very lucrative market. You just plug in when using it. Besides, a USB flash drive can be a cheap and effective solution if you have to transfer data between computers in office where does not have a LAN network, which is also a solution for other place where the staff cannot send documents to each other like schools. If you have ever been a user of a USB flash drive, you must know that the data that stored in flash drives are impervious to scratches and dust, and flash drives are mechanically very robust making them suitable for transporting data from place to place and keeping it readily at hand. And almost personal computers support USB. Compared to hard drives, flash drives use little power and has no fragile moving parts. Aside from these, flash drives implement the USB mass storage device class so that most modern operating systems can read and write to them without installing device drivers. The flash drives present a simple block-structured logical unit to the host operating system, hiding the individual complex implementation details of the various underlying flash memory devices. The operating system can use any file system or block addressing scheme. Some computers can boot up from flash drives. On the other hand, flash drives have disadvantages that cannot be overlooked. Although it is completely portable and can store a lot of data, that data can also be lost. More people lose flash drives than car keys because of its size and the necessity for it to go everywhere with you. Now it can even be easily infected by viruses. In addition, the flash drive's design usually involves a retractable USB plug. As with any moving parts, wear and tear may damage or break the USB plug. And because little protects the flash drive, there is also the potential for bending the relatively soft metal of the USB plug, which renders the device useless.