A pen drive needs to be connected to a personal computer for transfer of files to it and vice versa. Have your wondered how it gets connected and what protocol does it use for such communications.

The USB – Universal Serial Bus is a communication standard developed by the computing industry to overcome the problems of the connecting a vast number of equipment and devices to the personal computer over a single connector replacing the serial and parallel ports.

The early pen drives used the USB 1.1 specifications to connect to the personal computer by plugging itself on to the USB port on the computer system. The data transfer speed on this specification was limited upto 2 m bits per second and was rather slow for heavy duty usage. Then the system was upgraded to USB 2.0 specifications which provided for higher speed of data flow at 400 m bits per second. This was as significant improvement is data communication speed and truly made the pen drives mimic the personal computers hard disk.

Pen drivers are evolving very fast, a year back the pen drives of capacities over 1 Gb were very rate to be found and very expensive and now your have the 32Gb pen drives flying off the selves like hot cakes. The bigger the storage capacity the more expensive it becomes still it has become the hot favorite of the masses as it has become cheaper, safer and reliable. The pen drives are now considered to be the best in portable backup data storage equipment.

The days of the floppy drives and zip drives are practically over and most of the computer manufacturers have stopped provisioning for them on the machines. The laptops now have no serial port or parallel port but just the USB port. Yes the number of USB ports in any machine have cone up from two to four for connectivity with multiple devices.