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First Commercially Sold Flash Drive
Trek Technology and IBM began selling the first USB flash drives commercially in early 2000. It could store up to 8MB which was more than five times the capacity of floppy disk. -
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The History
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Second Generation Flash Drive Created
Added higher maximum bandwidth of 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s) (now called "Hi-Speed"). Further modifications to the USB specification have been done via Engineering Change Notices (ECN). The most important of these ECNs are included into the USB 2.0 specification package available from USB.org. -
Storage Capacity Grows
Storage capacity for USB flash drives grow. They started at 8MB and have now reached 500MB -
Storage Continues to Grow
Memory for flash drives continue to grow at a fast pace. 1GB, 2Gb and 4GB are now commercially available. -
Variety of Commercial Flash Drives Available
Now in stores all over the world there are multuple shapes, sizes and colors to choose from. Other brands have picked up on designs for flash drives. i.e. Coca-Cola, Hello Kitty. -
Flash Drive Capacity Grows Cont.
Now sold commercially and available all over the world are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB storage units. -
Third Generation is Released
Specified with a maximum transmission speed of up to 5 Gbit/s (640 MB/s), which is 10 times faster than USB2.0 (480 Mbit/s), although this speed is typically only achieved using powerful professional grade or developmental equipment. USB 3.0 reduces the time required for data transmission, reduces power consumption, and is backward compatible with USB 2.0. -
Flash Drives Reach Largest Capacity
The largest flashdrive sold commercially was created in Europe. It can store up to 256GB within it's small standard shape. It is sold at £576.56
