Flash drives, thumb drives, memory sticks, are all basically the same thing, a very small device that stores stuff. This is really the replacement for the outdated floppy disk, that would not even hold one current high quality digital photo!
You can store many Gigabytes of information on a Flash Drive, and stick it in your pocket or purse, and hit the road. You can plug it in any USB port on any other computer and read the information. These little babies are pretty slick and very handy.
There are many brands and a few of the top ones are Corsair, SanDisk, Kingston, OCZ, Transcend, and a host of others. The prices range from $5 to over $100. Basically you pay for more space. You can find 1GB drives starting at $5 and for a 64 GB you can pay over $100.
To put things in perspective, a 10 Mega pixel photo is about 3 Megabyte large, so a 1 GB Flash drive will hold 300+ photos at the 10 MP size. 16GB Drives will hold about 4500+ photos.
The important thing to remember is that Flash Drives are temporary storage, they are erasable and not permanent. They are NOT for archiving or permanently backing things up. A more stable medium such as CDs or DVDs should be used for long term storage and safe backups.
One last important point on these drives, is that you can copy virus infected files to them if you have a virus infected computer. The good thing is that if you have a good antivirus program on the computer you are plugging in the USB drive to, it should catch any viruses before they get to the other computer. One more reason to ALWAYS have good, up to date Anti-Virus software.
Here is more detailed information on USB Flash Drives on Wikipedia
One other important note that can really throw you for a loop is the U3 drives. If you get a U3 Drive it will say so on the package and it might even cost a little more than a standard Flash drive.
The U3 drive does something neat, it allows you to put a software program on your Flash Drive, and run it on other computers, without installing the software on the other computer. This is nice, but most people don’t need this feature, and never use it.
The HUGE problem is that the Flash Drive installs the U3 software installs on your computer as soon as you plug it in, and it is very rude stuff. It acts like it is taking over your system. I highly recommend not buying one of these drives, unless you really need it.
I have a link to a good site that talks about how to remove the feature from your Flash Drive. You can download a little program that will erase the software from the Flash drive, so you do not have to deal with it.
How to Remove U3 from a Flash Drive
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