USB Flash Drive
A USB flash drive is essentially NAND-type flash memory integrated with a USB 1.1 or 2.0 interface used as a small, lightweight, removable data storage device of up to 16 GB (as of 2006). USB flash drives use the USB mass storage standard for removable storage devices. To use such a device, your operating system must have driver support for both USB mass storage plus the file system used on the flash drive. Microsoft Windows ships with driver support for USB mass storage since Windows Millennium Edition and Windows 2000. Windows 98 did not ship with USB mass storage support, so a driver supplied by the vendor of the flash drive is required.
SB flash drives are also known as “pen drives”, “chip sticks”, “thumb drives”, “flash drives”, “USB keys”, and a wide variety of other names. They are also sometimes erroneously called memory sticks, which is a Sony trademark describing their proprietary memory card system.