A USB stick is also called a flash drive or a removable hard drive. These are storage devices in which information can be stored and transferred to another system easily. Benefits of using USB sticks are that, they are easy to carry, even if they have large storage capacities. Their sizes are not directly proportional to their storage size. With the technology advancing day by day, the physical sizes are reducing and the virtual sized are increasing. Pen drives are available in the market which can store information easily up to several gigabytes.

There have also been proposals to develop drives which can store data up to one terabyte and even two terabytes. With the increase in the technology, the prices are also decreasing with the increase in the quality of the product. The types of storage devices available can be divided into two broad categories, ones which are portable and the ones which are non-portable. The potable ones can be directly connected to the systems and can be used without connecting them to any external energy source, while the non-portable ones require external energy source such as electricity to run on the systems. They can be connected using wires.

Benefits of using USB sticks is that they can be plugged conveniently into any system, being supported by any modern operating system available in the markets today. They are pre-loaded with suitable software which helps install the hardware onto the system, in order to operate normally. One can buy external hard drives easily on the internet, with many sites selling them which also provide the customer with a warrantee card to ensure free repairs on the device if occurred in a certain time period.

One should be careful while buying pen drives, since many of them are sold, claiming to have higher storage capacities then they actually have. When these are plugged into the systems, they do show the false capacities but once the customer actually starts using it, the drives might either hang or the write may fail to complete. In some of the cases the data gets over written on the already existing data. There are special software tool available which can be used to check the actual capacities of the flash drives. This way, one can distinguish between fake USBs and the genuine ones. Once detected, the faulty ones can be repaired to flash the actual size of the drive and it can be used normally by the user.