Many of us slightly older folk will still remember the humble floppy disk which was the computing industries first real mobile storage media for the mainstream user and when first introduced was an ideal way of transferring data across computers, as long as you did not mind formatting the disk or re-writing it a number of times because of corruption on the first few attempts.

Also the USB 1.0 format was relatively new back in the day, devices that took advantage of the technology were relatively thin on the ground so if you were really lucky you did not have to get involved with larger files that often required spanning across many disks which was even more fraught with frustrastion.

But as computing power grew at a fast pace the size of files seemed to grow exponentially and the floppy drive was simply not up to the job meaning many people were left having to burn very expensive CD’s as burning technology came into play in the nick of time.

USB was making rapid gains fortunately and manufacturers were coming up with many new uses for this very user friendly (operating system permitting) plug and play capability, and the pen drive was borne not a moment to soon in my opinion. Mobile data transfer capacity rocketed upwards from a humble 2mb and it did not seem too long until the capacity of USB pen drives surpassed that of the CD.

The Computer repair and IT industries where some of the first serious adopters of pen drives primarily due to the fact that system tools could be easily carried on a flash drive and with the larger capacities reduced the need to carry around a number of CD disks used for diagnostics or computer maintenance utilities.

As capacities grew though faster data transfer speeds were needed and this led to the emergence of the second generation of USB …USB 2.0.

The USB interface and standard is now nicely matured and USB interfaces are common across a range of consumer devices from phones to cameras and even video players although it was and still is to a degree questionable as to whether USB or Firewire would win the day as the dominant data transfer protocol.

The USB pen drive has really risen to the challenge to take advantage of the USB interface and storage capacities are enormous and far beyond most peoples requirements, What were almost in the beginning icons of your technical prowess have now become a mainstream device and sales are said to exceed 150 million units per year just for pen drives alone. The USB interface is also said to be present in over 6 billion consumers devices and this number is growing at over 30% per annum.

Increases in drive capacities has raised a number of issues across many industry sectors including the Data recovery industry, which has had to evolve new USB memory recovery techniques for recovering data from these flash based devices.

Transferring data has become so easy that scant regard has been paid to data backup and equally in the drive to manufacture cheaper products manufacturing standards appear to have slipped resulting in memory controller errors, which of course in turn has led to an increase of lost data.

Some Data recovery companies have of course stepped up the mark and the pen drive recovery industry is now alive and well.

Another problem area with plug and play devices is that of data security and the sheer ease of file transfer has given many business and government bodies severe data security headaches resulting in extreme cases to the USB interface being disabled on computers, Pc’s and laptops in security sensitive environments.

As it seems with all technology every development brings us even greater speed and the new USB 3.0 standard is no exception promising data transfer speed 10x greater than current specs which will give us transfer speeds around 5Gbps.

This very fast transfer speed may of course signal the end of the older firewire standard which has been falling behind more recently.

The USB 3.0 standard has now been rolled out and accepted by most mainstream technology players but it may be still be some months before we see any consumer based products or reasonably priced motherboards supporting this latest standard.