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Flash memory sticks have burst onto the data storage scene in fairly recent times - but what do we know about them? Mathew Luu demystifies flash memory.
Remember when every computer came with a floppy disk drive and floppy disks were 4.5-inch and actually floppy? Floppy disks were once the preferred portable storage medium used by the computing community. As the name suggests, the disks were simply a thin, flexible ('floppy') round ('disk') magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell.
Floppy disks bit the dust in the late 1990s (although floppy disk drives remained) and it wasn't that long before handbags and briefcases rattled with the all new USB "stick". The proper name for these sticks is USB flash drives.
Flash memory is defined as "static" memory which means it can be electrically erased and reformatted over and over again. Flash memory is primarily used in devices such as USB drives and digital memory cards and its benefits include:
* Greater capacity. Although they started with as little as 30 megabytes worth of...