The Pen drive, more commonly known today as a USB drive, serves as a mobile storage for computing systems. Designed off of a non-volatile memory type, these small memory units are praised for their use in small electronics such as cameras and MP3 players. Praised for their solid state nature and ease of mobility, pen drives have become a common and inexpensive form of computer storage

 Function :

Pen drives act as permanent storage drives that interface with the computer through a USB or Fire wire port. These Pen drives store information for any of the same uses an internal hard drive. The Pen drives use flash memory modules that hold data in a NAND memory configuration, which have increased sequential read and write speeds but reduced random access times.

 Benefits :

Pen drives today come in capacities of 128 GB and higher and often weigh less than 1 ounce. This high-density storage is perfect for large scale data back up and retrieval. Also, the plug and play connectivity of USB and Fire wire coupled with their diminutive size of often less than 2 inches provides for easy mobility of large data sets.

 Considerations :

Though Pen drives offer large data capacity and mobility, they are not well suited for intensive memory applications. Pen drive flash memory technology has a much shorter MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) than standard internal mechanical hard drives. The memory cells can only be written to and read from so many times before they fail completely and are ignored by the memory module.

 Potential :

Recently, the so-called solid state drives, which are built off the same technology as Pen drives, have been released for use as internal hard drives. These drives use an advanced memory architecture that maintains of record of the reads and writes to each memory cell and staggers them appropriately to increase the life of the drive. These hard drives boast impressive access times; however, due to their foundation as Pen drive derivatives, they still lack random access efficiency, which leads to decreased multitasking ability when used as a computer's main storage device.

 Transfer Speeds :

The actual transfer speed depends upon several factors, such as the computer's speed at reading and writing to the device. Generally, a pen drive's advertised speed is the reading speed because it is faster than the speed at which data can be written to it. Manufacturers usually list the speed in megabytes per second (MB/s). The age of the drive and how it's being used — such as for writing and erasing small files — also affects the transfer speed.

 Uses of USB Pen Drive

 To transport personal data :
 The commonest use of USB pen drive is to transport or store "personal" files such as documents, pictures and video. One can also store medical alert information for emergency use or as preparation against disaster.

 Repairing computer :
Successful usage of USB pen drive has been noticed in the PC repair field as a means to transfer recovery and antivirus software to infected PCs. It also allows a portion of the host machine's data to be archived in it in case of emergency.