The flash drive was invented in Singapore. Back in early 2000, Trek Technology conceived the idea of a little device for the storage and transportation of information and data. They christened it the ThumbDrive – a storage drive the size of your thumb. A few companies still dispute the patent but the usefulness and convenience of a flash drive is undisputed.

Flash drives are small and light and you can easily plug them in or pull them out of your computer’s USB port and write and rewrite any type of data on them. These include the usual documents, pictures and videos, a host of U3 applications which are programs optimised to be launched from flash drives, and also recovery, antivirus, maintenance software to repair and set up computers.

As at Jan 2007, the record holder has a whopping capacity 64GB – that’s way larger than the hard disk drives of some laptops! It is available at a princely sum of around US$5,000. Even with the more common 1, 2 or 4GB flash drives; you can literally carry your whole life in your pocket or around your neck on a lanyard.

There are many designs for the flash drive ranging from an all-business titanium-coated drive to one that looks just like a piece of sushi. But the basic components don’t vary:  a male type-A USB connector, USB mass storage controller, NAND flash memory chip – the actual memory of the drive and a crystal oscillator.

Compared to a floppy disk, a flash drive is leagues ahead in every aspect: speed, resistance to scratches and dust, durability, and capacity. But every device has a rated life. For example, erasable optical media such as CD-RW and DVD-RW are rated at up to 1,000 cycles – the less common DVD-RAM goes up to 100,000 cycles. Since there are no moving parts in the core structure, flash drives seem indestructible. But NAND flash memories used in flash drives are rated between 100,000 to 1,000,000 cycles.
Most flash products on the market are guaranteed to withstand 1 million erase cycles. Techniques embedded in the drive firmware like Wear Levelling and Bad Block Management do help extend the life of the drive by spreading out the writing across all the memory sectors and remapping to good sectors in case of write failures. Trek itself says that the data stored in their devices “can last about ten years without losing any integrity”.

The one sure thing: flash drives WILL fail. It’s just a matter of when. The memory in the flash drive simply wears out over time.

But long before the memory chip inside fails through repeated use, other failures may occur. Because of its small size and seeming ruggedness, an average flash drive is subject to a lot of abuse. Externally, the casing or USB connector may be broken by physical impact. Vital internal connections may work loose or break, or be corroded by atmospheric humidity or fluids accidentally introduced into the drive.

While connected to a host computer, the flash drive is subject to virus attacks which may corrupt the stored data. A malfunctioning USB port on the host computer could burn out the internal electronics of the flash drive. Usually the memory chip inside a flash drive is well protected, but it is possible to fry the chip through an electrical surge introduced via the USB connector which could be caused by a power.

Data could also be corrupted because of user carelessness. Like if a flash drive is pulled out when the computer is writing onto it.