Bits'n'Bytes

As heard on CJCD

Episode 30

By now most of you have seen the back to school commercial on tv where the parents get on the bus and the bus driver asks who knows what a thumb drive is. And many of you have looked blankly at the screen and tried to figure out what the driver's talking about. What's worse, they never actually tell you what it is! Well, I feel your pain.

A thumb drive is the generic name given to a wide variety of USB flash drives. Originally manufactured under the name "Disgo" by the company M-Systems, IBM created and marketed flash drives under the name "Memory Key" and Lexar produced the "Jump Drive". The generic name "Thumb Drive" has been given to all of them because the standard size is about the size of your thumb.

A thumb drive holds special types of memory chips that can keep the information stored in them even when they're disconnected from a computer. The only power source needed to activate a thumb drive is the power the drive gets from the USB port on your computer, where a thumb drive is plugged into. The drives also have a special chip that tell it how to talk to your computer in the computer's own language and Windows XP has drivers built into it that are able to talk directly to that chip, making it a very convenient and high powered replacement for the old 3 and a half inch floppy drives.

Remembering that floppies can hold 1.4 megabytes of data, thumb drives are incredibly powerful. The first thumb drives invented could hold up to 8 megabytes of data. Standard thumb drives are now in excess of 2 gigabytes and drives up to 64 gigabytes exist. Transferring the data from a drive can be in excess of 50 megabytes per second on computers with USB2 ports.

Although far more durable than floppies were, thumb drives don't last forever, either. After several hundred thousand reads and writes, a thumb drive will start to slow down, hold less data, then eventually fail. All in all, though, they're incredibly handy for moving large amounts of data from one computer to another.

Stay tuned next week when I talk about why you should have a firewall installed on your computer.

I’m Computer Dave, thanks for your time.