Though the pen drives have achieved hard disk technologies, are they in a position to replace the traditional hard disks. A simple analysis of the both the products of technology will prove that the Pen Drives are no where near the technological marvel called the Hard disks though they have left behind all other portable storage technologies way behind them.
Lets us compare the hard disks as against a pen drive.
Main Features of these units:
Hard Disks Pen Drives
| IDE Interface |
USB Interface |
| Standard ATA Interface |
USB 2.0 |
| Low noise |
Noise Less |
| No Seek Error |
No seek Error |
| High Shock Resistance |
Extremely High shock resistance |
| No Latency Delay |
Slow response |
| Low Power Consumption |
Extremely low power consumption |
| Highest Product Quality and Fastest data access |
Limited to few thousand of writing cycles |
| Error Correction and Wear Leveling |
Not applicable |
| Extended Product life |
Slow data access and writing |
| Industry Standard interfaces |
Industry Standard interface |
| Plug in adaptation |
Plug n Play |
| Densities from 16MB to 4GB+ |
Densities of 16Gb + |
| Factory OS Format: as per requirement |
Ms Dos with extensions |
| Extended Temperature Range |
No limits on operations |
The pen drive falls back on the slow access and read write times compared to hard disks. The hard disk comes with data safety technologies like mirroring, raid and other features to ensure the safety and integrity of the data which is missing in a pen drive. Pen drive can never replace hard disk currently but the way technology has been progressing in the advancement of pen drive technology it is not very far always that we will have solid state hard disk with no moving parts with all the combined advantages of hard disk and pen drives all bundled in one package. The pen drive technology is a growing technology while the hard disk technology has already matured over the years.
