USB Comes Of Age
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 files grew larger the floppy simply did not make the grade, but as time passed the CD writer came of age which could hold a hefty 500mb of data, still a little more than most people required and media was originally quite dear as well.
Fortunately the USB (universal serial bus) standard was rapidly gaining ground and it was not long before a new breed of mobile storage hit the market which was of course the humble memory stick also affectionately called a thumb drive. These simple plug an play devices could hold a heady 2,4,6 or even 8mb of data (ok don’t laugh) and data transfer speeds of 12mbps which although slow by modern standards was in fact blisteringly fast back then.
The business computer support 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.
Increased capacities then drove the need for higher data transfer speeds and it was not long before USB 2.0 and then Hi-speed USB appeared and filled the need for speed
There was of course a lot of confusion between USB 2 and Hi speed USB at the time, which could transfer data at an astonishing 480mbps per second but a lot of early adopters were left more than a tad upset as industry often sold devices and PCI cards as USB 2.0 but in reality they were only USB 2.0 compliant and still had a much slower transfer speed.
All of that seems lost in the past know as the standard has emerged and is widely accepted by many as the de facto transfer protocol although the firewire camp would disagree but as technology matures time will tell.
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.
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 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.
Tagged: computers, Computing, Data Recovery, technology, USB, USB 3
Got something to say? Click here to reply
