Flash drives are at present the most versatile, efficient means of transportation and storage of computer data. Flash drives are also called as USB drives and thumb drives which come with a flash memory. Flash drives are very ideal for handling small amounts of data, which are rewritable. Flash drives are supposed to offer the original plug and play function. They are bit expensive, as any device, which has over a capacity of 1GB, tends to be a bit costly.

Flash drives are capable of transferring even large quantities of data without the need to worry as to whether the computer on the other side would be able to read the data or not. The consumers are now offered with a wide variety of choices as more than a dozen of flash drive manufacturers have entered into the market offering better flash drives with more and more storage facility. They are very smaller in size similar to the gum sticks with many gigabytes storage capacities. Owing to the heavy competition, the prices too have fallen. Buyers are very confused due to the availability of many different varieties of flash drives seen on the store shelves. To help them and to guide them for buying the right kind of device, some points are given below:

Flash drives differ mainly due to their storage capacity and price. There are also other considerations to be made like the kind of storage needed. For instance, a person who needs to save word files might be satisfied with a storage capacity of 128MB whereas if the same person has to store graphics or picture files, then he would require 512MB and more.

The physical size of the flash drives also has to be considered. Most of them are very small that they can be easily lost. There are persons who are not very comfortable with the tiny models. The shape of the flash drives is mostly rectangular in shape, but there are also some that may look like a bullet or a lipstick. The shapes differ for identification purposes, but whatever the shape might be, it should be very compatible with the computer on which it is intended to be used.

Reliability and durability are two main factors that need to be considered while buying a flash drive. Eventhough, no one has heard that a flash drive can fail; the possibilities of failing cannot be ruled out. Hence, it is very important that we stick to the reputed manufacturers rather than buying an unknown product, as it might not be worth taking the risk.

The security issue of the flash drives is well addressed by many manufacturers. Many of them offer software, which enables the user to protect the flash drive using password. The user can also segregate the areas in the flash drives as private and public areas. Recently biometric security feature like the fingerprint recognition is available in almost all the flash drives.

More number of features is being added to the flash drives to lure the consumers into buying them like the built voice recorders, MP3 players and so on.