Flash Drives are Taking Over - Dissecting a flash drive
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Take one quick look at a flash drive compared to a CD. Which one would you prefer to use to carry around your data? A side note: I had to throw away that disc because it was scratched when I picked it up. Who wants to lose their data? Not me.
Taking a quick look at a flash drive, you will realize the obvious; they are considerably smaller than recordable media. But what really makes up a flash drive? Is there a small hard drive in there or what? Some users would think so since it does show up as a hard drive, and not a floppy drive. When I dissected my flash drive, I found what a flash drive is really made of. Inside a basic flash drive there is a minimal amount of components. Some flash drives have additional features such as fingerprint readers and compression technologies built in. We're not going to get into those today.
Here my PNY Attaché flash drive has the USB connector, as well as a Toshiba flash drive controller. This tells the computer what kind of flash drive it is, its capacity, and all the necessary programming to make it function properly.
Every flash drive comes with the very basic components in order to operate. A standard USB plug is included every single flash drive; this is soldered directly to the PCB, which holds all the components that make up the drive.
After the USB connector is a flash drive controller. This integrated circuit relays information back and forth between the computer and the flash drive's storage device. The flash drive controller tells the computer what drive it is, its capacity, and where on the drive it can store the information.
The memory module is soldered onto the backside of the PCB. This NAND memory module is non-volatile and will retain its information, unlike system memory.
Most of the common flash drives have a memory bank on them; these are solid-state NAND memory modules. Unlike EPROM modules, NAND modules are much more affordable and make flash drives considerably cheaper. Similar to EPROM modules, NAND modules are non-volatile, which means that the drive does not need a power source to maintain data. It still offers fast read and write time, though not as fast as volatile DRAM, which is used for computer system memory. NAND memory modules provide better shock resistance than hard drives, which makes them ideal for portable devices like flash drives and battery powered MP3 players.
Next: Why should you use a flash drive? >>
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