USB flash drive

A USB flash drive is essentially NAND-type flash memory integrated with a USB 1.1 or 2.0 interface used as a small, lightweight, removable data storage device of up to 16 GB (as of 2006).

USB flash drives use the USB mass storage standard for removable storage devices. To use such a device, your operating system must have driver support for both USB mass storage plus the file system used on the flash drive. Microsoft Windows XP, 2000, ME and 98 Second Edition shipped with native support for USB Mass Storage devices, but any previous Windows version requires a driver that is usually available from the manufacturer. All versions of Linux which support USB and SCSI storage support USB flash drives, although some desktop environments assume that the drive is partitioned (not a safe assumption). Some recent USB flash drives act as two drives - as a removable disk device (the actual drive itself), and as a USB floppy drive (again, as the actual drive itself, but as another drive in Windows). Normally, the drivers for the removable disk device would be located on the floppy drive (one portion of the removable disk device), for operating systems that cannot find the driver for the drive natively.

USB flash drives are also known as "pen drives", "chip sticks", "thumb drives", "flash drives", "USB keys", and a wide variety of other names. They are also sometimes erroneously called memory sticks, which is a Sony trademark describing their proprietary memory card system.