How does a USB thumb drive store information w/o using either a Hard Disk or an energy source?

Question

To the first answer I mean after you unplug the USB drive how does the info stay onto the drive w/o being put on like a HD or having a constant energy source to store the info such as RAM.

Answer 1

Easy way to say is that it works like a CD-RW disc.
You could wirte anything to the CD-RW disc and, it will retain the info without using battery.
You could erase and re-write to it, too.

The ROM chip inside the Thumb drive works like that. It is erasable & programable.
So, once programed, it will retain that info until you erase it.

I think they called the chip, EEPROM or something like that.

Answer 2

simple answer, the USB flash drives and other flash cards are effectively a cross between floppy discs and CDs the data is writen to the metal ssurface (just like you get on youor phones SIM cards for example) when you remove the sim the data remains on the card.
CDs work the same way kind of by that i mean they use a metalic surface to record your data.
and the firstperson to answer was right your USB port has a typical 5Volt power output hence any device you plug in can be charged or powered by that port.
as for the specific science behind how the flash cards work and are made that is something that i have not bothered to learn yet. may be i will find out one day, but it is not a burning issue to resolve.
the hard disk is again like a floppy in that the data is stored regardless of if the drive has power not, however to read or write to the drive you need power (a Hard drive has a 12Volt and 5Volt power connection) typically a hard drive uses the 12 Volt connection to work correctly.

good luck. and if in doubt use a search engine to find out the data from one of the flash card makers such as kingston or sandisk or any of the other leading brands on the market.

Answer 3

the only distinction in the two complicated drives is actual length. 2.5 inch exterior drives are small in length and very easy to hold around with you. One the different hand, 3.5 inch drives tend to be a be great and slightly on the heavy side. the two will us USB to connect on your structures so as that they are going to paintings with the two laptops and desktops. additionally, for those people who have not set up a community, exterior complicated drives are an fairly good thank you to pass records between desktops. the only benefit that the three.5 has over the two.5 is the quantity of records that they could carry. workstation drives are for the main area plenty smaller and carry much less records then do the same old 3.5 inch drives.

Answer 4

Because the info is stored on circuits (just as it is on your computer), when the USB gets plugged in you can access that stored information. A thumb drive doesn't need power to have information stored (just like your computer still has info stored when it is shut down) because the circuits retain the information. You do need power to access the info, though.

A circuit, physically, is hard: it's made of silicone and metal. But, it's referred to as flash memory, probably because of its transportability. However, flash drives store info the same way that hard disks store it. It's written onto memory (circuit) chips so it be reaccessed later.

Answer 5

USB Memory "sticks" use memory chips that retain their memory even when the power is off. Nerds call this non-volatile memory. There is no hard drive or battery in the stick. There is a control chip to control access to the memory chips that powers up when you plug the memory stick into a USB port.

Answer 6

USB flash drives store data using NVRAM. (Non-volatile random access memory).

The easy way to explain how this (and camera memory chips, btw) work is to say that they can retain their value without power.

The not-so-easy way to explain this requires more detail on how NVRAM physically works.

Most flash memory uses a large number of floating gate transistors. These can store a charge for long periods of time without power being applied. Each transistor holds one bit. [This description is a bit simplified, btw.]

A byte (a single character, number, letter, space, etc) is 8 bits.
1024 bytes is a kilobyte (KB)
1024 kilobytes is a megabyte (MB)
1024 megabytes is a gigabyte (GB)
Using the same pattern, it goes on to Terabytes (TB) and Petabytes (PB).

If you have a 1GB USB flash drive (or flash card, etc), you should have at least 8,589,934,592 floating gate transistors. Fortunately, they are extremely small, usually measured in nanometers and microns.

Answer 7

The information is stored as digital 'bits' on a mini chip, same as if you write on a DVD then remove it from the machine, the info's still there and you can edit or erase it whenever you want.

Answer 8

USB ports actually output power. Thats why many mp3 players charge by simply plugging into a usb port.

Answer 9

usb does have its own mini hd oooops yeah a mem chip