USB flash drive
Revision as of 13:18, 18 January 2007 by Nsonsteb(talk | contribs)

Usbflash.jpg

A USB flash drive, also called thumb drive or USB key, is a storage medium for data such as Microsoft Word documents, pictures, music, etc.

How to Use

They plug into the USB port of any computer and act as a small hard drive that you can copy and save files to.

Size

They come in various sizes all the way from 16 megabytes to 4 gigabytes in the consumer market.

Other names

  • thumb drive
  • pen drive
  • flash drive
  • USB key
  • flash stick

How to format a flash drive

Diskutilityflashdrive.png

Mac OSX

  1. Open Disk Utility (Applications-->Utilities-->Disk Utility)
  2. Insert the flash drive into your USB port.
  3. On the left-hand side pane of Disk Utility, your flash drive should appear.
  4. Click it once to select it.
  5. On the right-hand side, find the the Erase menu, click it once.
  6. Choose MS-DOS File System.
  7. Rename the flash drive.
  8. Click the Erase button.


Windows