A thumb drive is one of the many names associated with USB flash memory sticks.
Contents
Use Cases and Competition
Thumb drives are a form of removable storage media.
They superseded optical storage media such as the CD and DVDs as the removable storage media of choice.
They were also the final nail in the coffin for floppy disks to be replaced by optical storage media.
Thumb drives are handy for transferring files from one gadget to another when physical access to both is possible.
External hard drives are reasonable alternatives when dealing with substantial thumb drives.
Options have much larger capacities and can support the latest high-speed USB standards.
External hard drives can also be cheaper than large thumb drives.
Thumb drives still win on portability, though external m.2 SSDs can come pretty close.
Timeline
Flash memory was invented in the early 1980s.
The first thumb drives were sold in the year 2000.
Early thumb drives used the USB 1.1 interface, limiting performance to around 1.5MB/s when allowing overhead transmission.
By 2002 thumb drives were available using USB 2.0, offering speeds of around 35MB/s when accounting for overheads.
As newer generations of the USB protocol have been standardized, thumb drives have typically followed.
USB 3 thumb drives are now using the USB-A and USB-C connectors every day.
A standard thumb drive may have 8, 16, or 32GB storage.
Much larger models, however, are available, with up to 2TB of storage.
Exceptionally high-capacity models of thumb drives tend to have a price premium, as you might expect.
This can make external hard drives of comparable capacity cheaper.
External M.2 SSDs may not necessarily be able to compete on price, being fairly high-end themselves.
However, they can offer even more storage space and are more likely to support higher transfer speeds.
Risks to Consider
When using a known thumb drive, you must account for two risks.
The first is that the thumb drive is pretty small, making it easy to misplace.
Many thumb drives feature an attachment point for a keychain that can help keep track of them.
The second risk is connecting a known thumb drive to an untrusted gear.
Some malware is known to opportunistically infect thumb drives and use them to spread to other computers.
When dealing with an unknown thumb drive, there are even more risks.
Without plugging it into a computer, there is no way to know the drives contents.
Unfortunately, malware can launch itself, infecting your system automatically.
This can happen even if you immediately scan the thumb drive with an antivirus tool after connecting the drive.
Unfortunately, malware isnt the worst possible outcome regarding unknown thumb drives.
USB Killer is a hardware platform designed to look like a thumb drive; it doesnt feature any storage.
Instead, it features capacitors.
This can and is intended to fry the circuitry.
While replacing the motherboard in a desktop computer may be possible, this generally necessitates replacing the entire computer.
The name came from the fact that theyre typically roughly the size of a thumb.
Some novelty models may even look like a severed thumb.
Storage capacities vary from a few gigabytes to two terabytes.
Many thumb drives operate at USB 3.0 speeds but can still be limited to USB 2.0 performance.
Care should be taken when interacting with untrusted devices, as thumb drives can be infected with malware.
