Removable, portable, and rewritable, all around multi functional, USB Flash Drives which came into widespread use in late 1990s and 2000 have proved to be one of the most useful and versatile products in the modern world. Their power and capabilities have also grown with time.

Their increasing capability has allowed them to be used for variety of purposes; personal data storage and transport, backup, assist system administration and security, execute applications without installing into computer, software demonstration and marketing, boot device, increase system memory, are some of the uses that comes to mind. Their versatility is ever expanding. For instance, some of them now have sound output capability so can act as music players.

First flash drives had only 64MB of memory. Now on the other hand USB flash drives are touching 32GB. This will only increase as more of the recent breakthroughs in technology are incorporated into memory chip production.

These days flash drives are capable of sustaining 1 million plus rewrites and can retain their data for over ten years. In addition, you can obtain USB memory card readers that allow the memory to be removed from the drive separately, thus allowing even more flexibility of purpose.

Others portable storage methods such as floppy disks, or rewritable CD-ROMs, suffer greatly in comparison to flash drives. Unlike USB flash drives they are large, slow, have less storage capacity, have limited rewriting capacity, or have moving parts (so are unreliable). In most cases, they suffer from all these faults at once.

In fact, word “drive” is misleading since USB flash drives do not have any moving parts. The word was used because they appear as such in operating system interface.

Flash memory chip is placed on a circuit board that is encased in plastic, rubber or metal covering. This makes it very sturdy. This also allows for customization of the appearance of USB flash drives; it can look like a key tag, a pen or many other things.

Data is accessed by computer or other gadgets like MP3 players through the USB port. USB port also supplies the power required.

Yes, you heard me right. A breakthrough in technology is likely to increase the storage capacity of electronic devices like MP3 players by a factor of almost hundred and fifty thousand. As I always say more the better!

Currently a state of the art player will hold about forty thousand songs. To make another comparison today’s best 3.5 inch hard drives can hold about one terabyte of data. But if promise of this discovery holds true, 500 terabyte disks are on the horizon.

Key discovery is a switch the size of a molecule or fraction of a nanometer. This allows the stored data to be retrieved ands stored without increasing the size of the gadget using the storage. Switch consists of two banks of molecules placed 0.32 of a nanometer apart from each other on a carbon or gold plane. This in theory allows for 1 billion transistors to be placed on a single microchip.

Discovery published in respected scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology was made by Lee Cronin and Malcolm Kadodwala, chemistry professors at Glasgow University in UK, assisted by researchers at Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington, UK, which houses Synchrotron, a huge radiation source.

Utility of this breakthrough will of course extend well beyond their possible use in music players to all electronic devices. Everyone will get more power and storage.

This is also radical in that it there is no need for fragile silicon, the staple semi conducting material in all modern chips. It may be possible for these switches to be planted on plastic, since they work with carbon, thus allowing greater flexibility to the whole field.