History of USB Pen Drives
USB pen drive or flash drive uses a tiny PCB (Printed Circuit Board) to store large amounts of data and its data storage is based on EEPROM technology which has undergone many changes since it was first used. Although, the first ever pen drive which is also known as Thumb Drive was rolled out by Trek, a computer hardware manufacturing company in market in 2000, other companies developed and started to sell similar type of devices in the market during this period.
Early developments of Flash Drives
Between 1998 and 2001, SanDisk, which was formerly known as M-Systems, was involved in developing DiskOnKey and USB flash drive. M-Systems sold their USB type devices under the names like DiskOnKey and Diskey. In early 2000, Lexar, another company introduced some new features with their USB drives like Compact Flash, memory card reader and USB cable. These new features helped to access the data without using external USB devices like USB Hub.|
IBM was also a pioneer in USB flash drive and its documentation of the USB Flash drive and its functions helped the manufacturers to develop the pen drive and introduce new features. Initially, M-Systems worked closely with IBM and produced DiskOnKey for IBM before it introduced it in the commercial market in 2000. The first DiskOnKey had a capacity of 8 MB. Shimon Shmueli who was closely associated with IBM, launched his own company, KeyNetica. This company developed the small storage devices that can be used with PCs and can be convenient for easy transportation. Later, SanDisk bought the rights of manufacturing these devices and developed U3 and Ceedo, the advanced concepts of USB drives.
Flash Memory
Pen drive uses the concept of flash memory which can store large amounts of data and also be economical. There are two types of flash memory - NOR and NAND. Dr. Fujio Masuoka of Toshiba invented flash drive in 1984. This memory was much faster than the other types prevalent in that period. Five years later, Toshiba introduced NAND flash. NAND memory is ideal for greater storage and longer endurance when compared with NOR flash memory chip.
Higher Storage capacities
USB Flash drive uses NAND flash memory chip. NAND chip using Multilevel Cell Technology was developed by SanDisk and Toshiba in 2005 and this chip had the storage capacity of 1 GB. In the same year, Samsung Electronics developed 2 GB memory chip for the flash drive which had the largest capacity that time.
A year later, Samsung introduced 4 GB and 8 GB NAND chips. By 2007, flash drives with a range of storage capacities were introduced in the market. Currently, we can get flash drives with storage capacities ranging between 512 Mb and 16 GB for affordable prices. However, flash drives with the maximum capacity of 128 GB are also available but they are very expensive.
