USB flash drive : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

The official generic name is now UFD (Universal Flash Drive). Asian companies often have a typo and call them UFBs. Most vendors are now calling them flash drives.

thumbdrive is the proprietary name used by Trek. the Singapore-based maker of the first units. A device that looks like a keychain fob that can be used to store and transport information. It is like a tiny solid state disk drive that plugs into your USB port. You can also use them as backup devices. A 32 MB thumbdrive holds as much as 7 DVDs. It is reusuable and orders of magnitude faster.

As Electronic Floppies

Corel gave me a 2 GB freebie flash drive. It hold thes equivalent of 3 CDs.

As Extra RAM

As Scratch Drive

Secure flash drives

Security software is used to protect data transported in flash drives, to provide a variety of encryption keys to encrypt corporate data on disks, and to store a list of internet passwords.

You can think of it as like a sophisticated key you plug into the ignition to give you specific access to various functions depending on which key you use. In a car, the analog would be a child’s key that lets them run the radio and DVD player only, or a valet’s key that lets them drive but not open the glove compartment or trunk.

Clever units, such as the Safe Net iKey 2032, implement PKCS #11 or cryptokey, an platform-independent scheme for hardware tokens. There is plenty of room in there for multiple keys. You could, for example, have different keys for different purposes or different keys for different times of day, days of the week, months, or years. They are like a more flexible dongle. Like ordinary thumbdrives, then can contain private keys, however, unlike ordinary flash drives, they they protect them from being duplicated, even by the owner of the thumbkey. They keys cannot be extracted. They can only be used to digitally sign/encrypt/decrypt. So a flash drive can behave like a robust smart card. Like a smart card, they can have a pin.

The Ironkey is a high-end secure card that self destructs if it detects tampering. They have a James-Bondian Flash demo to explain the product.

There are flash drives with biometric finger print identification, with a builtin mini OS, AES encrypted data, These were specialty devices not long ago, but have become almost throw-away corporate gifts like pens. KCTS, the local PBS public TV station is giving away 1 GB thumbdrives to people who make a pledge. There are even jumbo flash drives holding 60 GB actually a miniature hard disk. Trek flash drive make models with flash memory and hard drives and also a model especially for security keys. You could even use an iPod as a flash drive.

One project pending is to set up the Replicator with flash drive-controlled encryption. They could also be used to protect expensive software from being hacked by encrypting parts of it or the data decrypted with keys stored in the flash drive, or by putting part of the software itself in the flash drive.

Trek

Some flash drives have a SIM reader. This means you can plug in a cell-phone Subscriber Interface Module and can read, edit, delete, and back-up your cell-phone phone book on your PC.

	recommend Amazon⇒USB Flash Drive 4GB
	asin: B000XBO264
OCZ, OCZUSBATVT4G, ATV Turbo, very fast, read at 33 - 35MB/s, write at 26 - 30MB/s, waterproof rubber, lifetime warranty. Good choice for ReadyBoost caching.
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	recommend Amazon⇒Corsair 16 GB Flash Voyager
	asin: B00154QAX6
GT USB 2.0 Flash Drive - CMFUSB2.0-16GBGT, very fast, read at 34MB/s, write at 28MB/s all rubber, 256-bit AES SW encryption, Ten year warranty. Available in many other capacities. Good choice for ReadyBoost caching.
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	recommend Amazon⇒Lexar 4 GB JumpDrive Lightning
	asin: B000JKYXJA
GJDP4GB-231, fast, read at 24MB/s, write at 16MB/s stainless steel case. Good choice for ReadyBoost caching.
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