Nowadays, USB pen drives have been replacing other traditional, easy-to-carry storage mediums like floppy disks, CDs and zip drives. While they offer you many advantages over other storage devices, they also suffer from a few drawbacks and this article provides you all details and information on both pros and cons of USB pen drives and thus helping you to buy the best pen drive which have balanced features.

 

 

USB flash drives are small, compact however they are solid and highly durable. As there are no movable parts inside them and the metallic or rubber casing protects the storage chip from all factors like heat, moisture and rough handling. These design features make them suitable for storing and transporting data to anywhere you like without having undue worries over the handling of these small devices.

 

Another convenient feature of USB pen drive is that it needs a USB port which all laptops and most PCs are provided with. All you need is a PC or laptop and plug the pen drive into its USB port to get access to the data stored in it.

 

All USB pen drives come with more data storage capacity than floppy disk which has just 1.44 MB storage capacity. While a typical CD has over 700MB, you can find many pen drives having more capacity than this storage level. You can also pick high-end, a bit expensive pen drives that have more capacity than DVDs.

 

 

Generally, flash drives can get required power from their bus circuits once they are plugged into the USB slot so they need no power while you transfer files between them and your laptop. On the other hand, other drives like floppy drive or hard drive since they have movable parts and the disk platters have to be rotated for data access, consume power and are dependant on electric power.

 

 

You can use pen drives in any operating system software like Microsoft Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix etc. For instance, Windows XP or later version of Windows displays the contents of pen drive as soon as you plug into the USB port. Similarly, you can also find Pen drives that can be used for booting the system that uses Windows or Linux OS.

 

 

When compared with CD (which can easily get scratches) or floppy disk (which can lose data due to factors like over-heat or moisture or casual use), pen drives can withstand these factors well and can keep the data much longer than CD or floppy disk. They also come with water-proof features so the data stored in them do not get corrupted even after complete wetting of the pen drives with water.

 

On the negative side, pen drives have a few shortcomings like other data storage devices. They are:

 

 

While the small size of the pen drives allows you to keep it in your pocket or take it to any place easily, there are also chances that you can lose it or drop it if you do not take enough care. To prevent that, you often have to attach it to keychain or belt so that you may not lose it.

 

 

Although USB flash drives have better durability when compared with floppy disk or CD, their quality also begins to degrade after certain times of writing data over their medium. Many USB pen drives can be used for plenty of times and you can write and erase the contents over them thousands of times. However, the data access becomes slow with time and usage and finally they become unusable.

 

 

Write-protect feature in drives mainly help the specific drives from virus attack when they are plugged into the PCs which have virus. Often flash drives come without write protect feature and become prone to virus infection from the laptop or PC, especially when you use them for booting the systems. It also helps you to avoid accidental erasing of contents on the flash drive.