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 emergence of USB 2.0 and hi speed USB was a bit of a debacle for many consumers however as many USB pen drives and PCI cards were sold at the time claiming to be USB 2.0 but it was not made clear that the devices still only had the transfer speeds of 12mbps as opposed to 480 mbps.The problem was so widespread that many countries trading standards bodies were involved due to consumer lobbying for clearer packaging.

The humble and originally very expensive thumb drive really took the market by storm and capacities rose to become greater than some people still have on their old computers, and it is now estimated than in excess of 150 million flash drives will be sold a year which of course is only the tip of the iceberg when you consider the estimated 6 billion plus USB interfaced devices in circulation which is growing at a rate of 2 billion per year.

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.

It is so easy to transfer and store data on these devices that many users are really taking them for granted and not saving their data elsewhere, which is all well and good until your drive breaks or gets damaged, or perhaps the memory controller fails.

Some Data recovery companies have of course stepped up the mark and the flash drive data 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.