In this video from ITFreeTraining I will look at removable flash memory devices. They contain no moving parts and can be easily transported from device to device. Over the years a lot of development has gone into these devices, so there are a lot on the market, and therefore it is important to understand their capabilities and what they can do. Download PowerPoint: https://itfreetraining.com/handouts/ap/3c50.pptx In This Video In this video I will be looking at three different types of flash memory devices, these being USB flash drives, Compact Flash and SD cards. These storage devices have become commonplace, so it is important to understand how to use and support them. To start with, I will look at a USB flash drive. USB Flash Drive USB flash drives are also known as Thumb drives or Jump drives as well as flash drives. Since these storage devices are small and USB is well supported, they have become very popular. Here is an example of a USB flash drive. This is an old USB flash drive that has 16 Gigabytes of flash memory. I will remove the plastic cover and have a look at what is inside. You can see at the top of the USB flash drive there are two chips and on the bottom is one chip. The two larger chips are the flash memory. The smaller chip is the controller chip. There is no official standard on how data is stored using flash memory. Thus, manufacturers are free to implement their own algorithms on how to store data on flash memory. You will find that some USB flash drives will have extra features such as encrypting the contents of the flash memory. The vendor of the USB flash drive will provide additional software that is used to encrypt and decrypt the contents of the flash drive. However, you will find that there are alternatives to this like Windows BitLocker that you can use as well. To get an understanding of how far flash memory has come, I have a brand new USB 3 128 Gigabyte flash drive to compare to my older 16 Gigabyte flash drive. They are about the same size, but notice how big it is when I remove the outer plastic. That’s it, the whole USB flash memory and controller plus the USB interface fit on this small piece of electronics. It really goes to show you how far the technology has come. Next, I will have a look at the performance of USB flash drives. USB Flash Drive Performance To understand USB performance a little bit better, consider that USB 2 max speed is 60 Megabytes per second while USB 3 max speed is 575 Megabytes per second. USB 3.1 max speed is 625 Megabytes per second. Flash memory is quite fast nowadays, so USB 2 speed limits the performance of modern flash memory. Thus, if performance is important, you may want to consider USB 3 devices. I have selected two USB flash drives currently on the market. The first one has a read speed of 100 Megabytes per second and a write speed of 40 Megabytes per second. When purchasing a USB flash drive, the manufacturer, if they quote the speed, will often quote the read speed but not the write speed. The write speed is always slower than the read speed and thus probably the reason they are not always up front about what it is. The second USB flash drive is a high-performance drive. The read speed of this USB flash drive is 420 Megabytes per second while the write speed is 380 Megabytes per second. Nowadays, I would only purchase USB 3 flash drives, as the performance of USB 2 is starting to show its age. If you are using a USB hub, you could have multiple devices all trying to share the same bandwidth making the speed even slower. Keep in mind that, just because it is USB 3 does not mean that the performance of the flash memory will be good, however generally it is a good indicator. There is not too much to know about USB flash drives; in most cases you simply plug them in and they work. If you need a certain performance for the USB flash drive, you just need to have a look at the specifications for it and make sure that it meets or exceeds those requirements. There is one little catch that you should know when using USB flash drives. I will now change to my Windows 10 computer and have a look. USB Flash Demonstration Description too long for YouTube. Please see the following link for the rest of the description. https://itfreetraining.com/ap/3c50 References “The Official CompTIA A+ Core Study Guide (Exam 220-1001)” Chapter 6 Paragraph 243-261 “CompTIA A+ Certification exam guide. Tenth edition” Pages 425 – 429 “CompactFlash” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompactFlash “UDMA” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDMA “Graphic: SD Cards” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#/media/File:SD_Cards.svg Credits Trainer: Austin Mason http://ITFreeTraining.com/ Voice Talent: Tomislav Krevzelj Quality Assurance: Brett Batson http://www.pbb-proofreading.uk/