USB Drives

If you have ever bought a tiny transportable drive for school or the office (or received as a giveaway at a trade show), you have probably heard it called by lots of names: jump drive, memory stick, flash drive, thumb drive, or USB drive.

What Does 'USB' Stand For?

Of all those colloquial terms, the correct is USB drive, with USB standing for 'universal serial bus'. Unless you think about yourself to be a nerd/geek/computer freak, which term will probably mean nothing to you, but the 'computer speaks' is actually simpler than it sounds.

Universal Serial Bus fundamentally refers to the development of a brand spanking new universal industry standard of connections between all the peripheral parts that your computer can use with other electronic devices. Your keyboard & mouse were the first (although those are becoming increasingly wireless as the know-how improves), but other parts would include printers, outside disk drives, cameras, & most recently pdas, & smart rings. The term 'serial' signifies that the new protocol was replacing the existing choice of serial or parallel ports (such as the elderly 'pin' type connectors for printers).

The push for this new protocol came, not surprisingly, from electronic manufacturers & program developers who were facing increasingly complex configurations of devices to be connected to computers. In 1994, a group of seven companies - Compaq, Dell, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, & Nortel began development of the USB drive (& corresponding USB ports). Intel produced the first silicon for USB in 2005. By 2008 over billion USB devices were being sold each year.

So Where Did The Other Names Come From?

The drives enabled files to 'jump' from computer to another, the lowest priced drives look like tiny plastic 'sticks' (usually black), & they are about the size of your 'thumb' (though getting smaller on a regular basis!). The term 'flash' refers to the 'flash memory' chip (that pre-dated USB drives by about 15 years) that could be electrically erased & reprogrammed multiple times.

IBM produced the first commercially obtainable USB drive in 2000 with a storage capacity of 8MB - pitifully tiny by today's standards but still over times the capacity of the floppy disks in use at the time. Storage capacity has grown exponentially since then - Kingston introduced its Knowledge Traveler 300 in 2009 with 256GB of storage capacity, & the 512GB cannot be far behind.

Regrettably, transfer speed has not grown as quickly. USB1.0, released in 1996, allowed a knowledge transfer speed of between 1.5 & 12 Mbits/s (Megabits of memory per second). USB2.0 was released in April 2000 with a "Hi-Speed" bandwidth of 480 Mbits/s (about 60MB per second). USB3.0 was announced in November 2008 with transmission speeds of up to 5Gbits/s but new drives are only beginning to come to market.