What are the different between thumb drive and external hard disk?

Question

(eg advantage, disadvantage, price, speed, security, etc.)

Answer 1

thumb drives are better because they are more portable, cheaper, but don't have much space. an external hard disk will be more expensive but will be cheaper per gigabyte than the flash drive (2 gb for about $50 compared to 200 GB for about $100. security is about the same, speed is more or less the same.

Answer 2

Thumbdrive:
- easily transportable, lower in price than Ext.HD, less space for storage, speed depends on the PC, some can be password protected.
Ext. H.D.
- can get pocket size, higher in cost, much more storage, speed depends on your PC, I'm sure there is a way to secure it with a password.

Have you done any research on your own? Go to www.bizrate.com and search for flashdrives and external hard drives. You will get a list of sellers by price and can make your own comparisons.

Answer 3

A thumb drive is small and uses flash memory. Flash memory usually peaks around 5-10 MB/s transfer rates. External hard drives, well, are "hard drives". They are mechanical and are generally a lot faster than flash drives averaging 40-50MB/s. In addition, you can buy them for cheap and they hold a lot more space.

Answer 4

External hard disks can usually hold more but are bigger, thumb drive smaller but fit in you "thumb" hince the name.

Answer 5

thumb drive is using flash memory the characteristic of flash memory is designed so that you can delete memory in blocks. each block may contain large data. it is not good for the task that requires lots of reading and writing and just useful for data transfer. but hard drive is more faster and good for frequent reading and writing.