Sam Tespasfou

Roberto Sedycias asked:


Sporting all the convenient features of a removable storage device - feather weight, small size, larger storage space, and durability - pen drive is a must-have device for the technology freaks. Of late, pen drive has evolved from being a mere storage device to multi-functional unit for the computer users.

For average users of pen drive, the device is a simple storage mechanism and they scarcely bother about the features so long as it solves their basic purpose of storing and transferring information. But the tech-friendly and discerning users of pen drives are more careful about the features.

Though the basic selection of pen drive is based on prime feature of storage space, technical enthusiasts are developing special interest for advanced features of pen drives.

Apart from the generic features of huge storage capacity, pen drives also feature built-in micro camera, voice recorder, biometric security, MP3 playback. Let us discuss about some of the basic as well as advance features of pen drives.

Storage capacity:

The ubiquitous Pen drive has earned its popularity due to its exceptional storage capacity. Earlier, the pen drives were available with 8 MB storage capacity, that was several times more than other removable storage device such as floppy and CD-ROM. Recently, pen drives are available with storage capacity of 32 GB, 64 GB and 80 GB.

Technology experts are looking forward to develop pen drives with tera bytes. Before a year, the pen drives with high storage space was not popular for their high price tags. But the rapidly decreasing price has made pen drive a easily accessible device.

Compatibility:

Compatibility is the most remarkable feature that you can find in your pen drive. The prime reason why you are using pen drive is to access the same data or information in different computers. But all computers you use may not have the same operating system to support. Most advanced pen drives are compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux. Basically, while choosing a pen drive you should look for this feature to get maximum benefits out of it.

Rechargeable battery:

The pen drive that provides MP3 playback through earphones needs power backup. That`s why some pen drives come with built-in rechargeable batteries. The battery gets charged when connected to the USB port of the computer.

MP3 player:

Music lovers can get their best from the MP3 player facility available with pen drives. The pen drive with MP3 player also features mini USB port, and an audio input and output.

LCD displays:

The LCD display of pen drive has made it a high-end device. The LCD display enables browsing through the list of songs that you store in pen drive.

Camera:

Camera is one of the most advanced features that are available with a pen drive. Basically, it is a still camera for a generic use. But when the pen drive is connected to the USB port of a computer, it functions as a web cam.

These days, pen drives are being developed with tiny speakers. Some pen drives are coming with inbuilt card readers. You can also find pen drives with finger print scanner as advanced security system.

While selecting pen drive you may be flooded with options regarding the shapes and sizes. Some resemble bricks and other toys. Of late, pen drives have been integrated with other necessary items that people love to carry such as watches and pens. If you look for advanced features in your pen drive you should collate adequate information regarding pen drives, their features and feasibility for your purpose.

Rg Hannah asked:


To maximize security a secure pen drive must with a strong authentication process to prevent illegal access to data. Using an 8 character password configuration reduces the possibility that a hacker could break the password. Encrypting confidential data in a secure pen drive enhancing its security as well. Encryption is one of the best measures a company can take to protect sensitive data to ensure it will remain confidential. A secure pen drive that can be managed from a central control server is necessary toward maximizing security and protecting confidential information safe from thieves.

Secure Pen Drive Technology

A secure pen drive that has the capability of being managed from a central server is much more then one that is not. Should a managed drive be lost, stolen or compromised in any way the drive can be terminated and access denied to the host system. A secure pen drive means much more then having the ability to put it under lock and key. It will be a challenge to control a drive if you can’t gain possession of it. A secure pen drive with central control will eliminate the need to have actual possession of a drive in order to secure it. Central control technology allows control of all drives and enhances security.

A secure pen drive is engineered by SanDisk and incorporates the more advanced technology to date. Their drives are engineered using a hardware based encryption and 256-bit AES algorithm.  This algorithm prevents the data on the drive from being accessed by unauthorized users. A secure pen drive utilizing data encryption that is proving to be many times more secure then the software based applications. If a secure pen drive using hardware based authentication is lost the drive is locked down after a number of failed passwords attempts.

Secure Pen Drive Anti-Malware

Incorporating the use of secure pen drives in companies is necessary to prevent attacks on operating systems. The software developed to avert attacks on operating systems through flash drives is called anti-malware software. Anti-malware software used in a secure pen drive that may be used as a host or access point to infect a host or operating system. McAfee a global security company has developed software used in SanDisk’s secure pen drive specifically for this purpose. The anti-malware scans for viruses to flash drives and operating systems. The anti-malware software removes the threat to the drive data before it has an opportunity to corrupt data or be uploaded to the host.

The need to utilize a secure pen drive which is properly managed and engineered is crucial for data security. A potential threat must be stopped first at the drive and next at the central control point. This is achieved by a secure pen drive with a strong authentication process. This prevents the unauthorized user from using the drive to gain access to the host system. Sometimes hackers are not looking to exploit data but only to corrupt it with a virus or worm they upload to the host operating system. A secure pen drive will prevent this from happening.

Derek Rogers asked:


Solid state drives have been around for many years, but recent technological changes have increased their viability and their popularity. At its simplest, a solid state drive is one that is built entirely out of semi-conductors, rather than a magnetic drive with moving parts. Originally, solid state drives referred to electronics that did not use vacuum tubes, but this definition is now outdated.

One commonly available form of solid state drive is a USB flash drive. These use the same kind of non volatile chip to retain information, even without power. However, these drives have different capacities and form factors from the solid state drives that are now beginning to enter the market.

* A flash drive is designed as an external piece of the computer system.

* A solid state drive is designed to be used inside the computer in place of magnetic hard drives.

On the outside, solid state drives don’t look any different from ordinary hard drives. That allows notebooks and desktop computers to use the solid state drive instead of a regular hard drive. They have the same dimensions as a conventional hard drive and use ATA or SATA interfaces in the same way as the drives we are all familiar with.

So, if these drives look the same and plug into computers the same way, why use them? The lack of moving parts in these drives gives them an advantage over conventional hard drive, which must use drive motors to spin magnetic platters and drive heads. The storage on a solid state drive is instead handled by flash memory, allowing less power to be used, data to be accessed faster and the drive to be more reliable overall.

Using solid state drives in portable computers is made much easier by their lower power use. Since they have no motors to draw power, they use a lot less energy than normal hard drives. While the portable computer industry has taken steps to address this, their solutions still use more power than a solid state drive. It consistently draws less power than either hybrid or traditional hard drives.

Faster data access is possible since the drive platter doesn’t have to spin up and there are no drive heads to move. That allows data to be read from a drive nearly instantly. There’s nearly a twenty percent improvement in the boot time of Windows on a solid state drive versus a standard drive. Reliability is also important. Since conventional hard drives are very fragile, being jarred can damage them. Solid state drives have no moving parts to be damaged, and can be used in computers that are meant to travel in rougher conditions.

Currently, the big reason these drives are not being used more widely, is cost. These drives have been available for a long time, but the cost of the drive would be equivalent to that of the entire computer they were installed in. Since these drives are growing more popular, price is going down, that suggests that solid state drives will soon be more readily available in forms other than USB flash drives.

Donna Barron asked:


My friend Sharon called recently to ask for my email address. Her hard drive crashed and she was in the process of rebuilding a new drive–application by application and, it would seem, one email address at a time. Everything on her old drive was gone, including the photos from her recent vacation. Unfortunately, the backups she had been doing so religiously every night contained nothing.

No one really expects a disk crash but drive failures do happen—and often at the most inconvenient times. In addition to the possible loss of important data files, a disk crash can leave you with the daunting task of having to replace the dead drive and reinstall your operating system and all of your applications. While you’re doing this—assuming you know how to do this, your computer remains nonfunctional.

While this “rebuilding” time can range from mildly annoying to extremely aggravating for a home computer user, it can bring a computer-dependent small business, or even a large office, to a virtual standstill. Whatever you use your computer for, having a quick and easy-to-restore backup can eliminate both the distress and the expense of the prolonged downtime normally associated with a hard drive failure.

When you’re restoring from a drive failure, the best kind of backup to have is an image backup. Most backup software products are designed to provide a way to backup and restore individual files. There are, however, some backup software applications that make it possible to backup your entire drive. A complete drive backup is called an image backup or image copy. Some full-featured backup software products will provide both image backup and individual file backup. They allow you to make an exact image copy of your drive and then supplement this with regular (daily, weekly, etc.) file backups. This is useful because, while some files on your hard drive change frequently, many files hardly ever change and need to be updated only rarely if ever at all.

An image copy is a drive to drive copy. In order to create an image copy you must have a second drive to backup or copy to. This can be a second internal drive but it is probably best to use an external drive, such as a USB or FireWire drive as your backup drive. The nice thing about an external backup drive is its portability. You can easily carry it home or lock it up each night. You can remove it and take it with you in case of an imminent disaster, such as a hurricane or flood. The one essential feature of your backup drive is that it must be as large as or larger than your source drive. Your source drive is usually your internal C: drive but it could be any drive you want to backup.

An important issue to consider when transferring an image copy to your backup drive is whether the data will be compressed or encrypted. While compression and encryption are useful tools, they can introduce the possibility of data corruption and this danger is magnified when dealing with such a large data transfer. There are, unfortunately, a great many reported cases of users who, like my friend Sharon, realized too late that their “backups” were nothing more than empty folders or that their backup data was corrupted beyond repair. When choosing any backup software, but particularly an image backup software, be sure that there is a way to verify the contents of the backup to ensure that your backup files contain good, usable, restorable data.

Restoring from an image backup eliminates all the work and time normally associated with rebuilding a new drive. When you restore the image backup to your new drive, not only all of your data files but all of your applications, your preferences, your latest hardware drivers and even your drive partitions are all transferred to your new drive. If you are restoring a boot drive image, the new drive will be bootable as well. The actual time involved in transferring the data to the new drive will depend on the size and speed of the drives.

The only other issue to consider when restoring an image backup is the drive partition size. When you transfer an image of one drive to another, the drive receiving the image will create a partition to contain it. This drive partition will be exactly the size of the old drive. If, for example, you make an image copy of a 120 GB drive on a 200 GB drive, the 200 GB drive will contain a 120 GB active partition and 80 GB of unusable space. If you wish to gain access to the unused 80 GB, you will need to expand the 120 GB partition. This will require a partition expansion utility. Some backup and drive copy software programs include a partition expansion utility.

How do you know if you really need an image backup? Consider how much you value your data, how much time (and money, if you have to pay someone else to do it) it will take to rebuild a new drive if yours fails and how inconvenienced you will be until your computer is up and running again. With external backup drives becoming increasingly affordable, even home computer users can now enjoy the security that drive to drive backup software can provide.

Rg Hannah asked:


With the millions of flash drives in use today a secure flash drive is essential for averting breaches of security. The number of security breaches reported has risen almost 50% and is likely to continue to rise. While the secure flash drive has makes data incredibly mobile it also makes it more vulnerable to loss and theft. If you are using less then secure flash drive you might want to look into SanDisk Enterprise. They produce a secure flash drive that features top of the line security including anti-virus software which drastically reduces the chances of uploading a virus to the operating system via a flash drive.

The Secure Flash Drive under Attack

The use of secure flash drive is necessary to prevent attacks on the valuable data they contain. Security software for flash drives is called anti-malware and can stop data corruption. This anti-virus software when part of a secure flash drive prevents the flash drive from playing host to a virus which then may be uploaded to an operating system. McAfee a global security company provides software for SanDisk Enterprise’s secure flash drive. It scans the flash drive for potential attacks to the host operating system and quarantines them. The software is so effective it removes the threat of attack before it has an opportunity to access the operating system.

The need to utilize a secure flash drive and provide both front end and back end security is a concern if mobile data is to remain intact. Employees that need mobile data need flash drives that are encrypted for security reasons. An adequately secure flash drive will feature the encryption necessary to protect information from being exploited by unauthorized users. A strong front end defense is a strong password authentication process that can work to avert breaches effectively. This in turn allows data to be transferred and stored with confidence. In order to consider it a secure flash drive it must utilize at least an 8-letter combination

password which has been proven unbreakable.

The Secure Flash Drive and Central Control

A secure flash drive to be truly protected against breaches must be controlled from a central control server. Anything less then this places the flash drive at risk. Recently the US Military was forced to put a ban on the use of flash drives because many personnel were not utilizing a secure flash drive. Once the threat was recognized the only way to get control was to place a ban on the use of all flash drives. Without a secure flash drive controlled from a central server the only way to safeguard the operating system is to put a system wide ban on the use of all flash drives. This situation could have easily been avoided with the flash drive system produced by SanDisk Enterprise.

A secure flash drive also eliminates still another threat that exists and that is in the manner in which data is transferred. A solution for the US Military should have been to implement a secure flash drive for their personnel like the ones produced by SanDisk Enterprise. They use the AES 256-bit encryption to protect data from security breaches. Flash drives that receive or store data that is not encrypted during the transfer process as well as after the transfer is complete are vulnerable to a breach. In the event a secure flash drive transmission is intercepted it is going to be useless because the encryption will prevent access to the data contained in the transfer.

Tape4backup asked:


The external hard disk drive is the form of the internal hard drive and can be connected to the computer system through the data (external) cables. Auxiliary power is required by some of the external hard drives and the other drives get the power from the USB 2.0 data connection. The external hard drives provide the facility to the users as an excellent backup hardware due to its portability and the capabilities of data storage. The external USB drives also have different sizes and shapes like the internal hard drives.

The drives that house 2.5 inches drive are called the compact drives while the other drives house standard 3.5 inches drive. The basic anatomy of the external drives is same but the casing may be different for the models and brands. The most typical type of connection for the external hard drives is the USB 2.0 (universal serial bus). The external drives also have the SATA and the Firewire connections.

The customer must be aware of his computer’s capabilities and requirements before selecting the external drive. The Firewire drive requires Firewire connections and therefore, the user will have to buy the additional hardware (Firewire connections) to operate the drive. Basically there are 2 camps of the users of external drives. One of them is those who connect the drive permanently and the second one is those who connect the drive only when they are backing up the data.

The users who connect the external drive permanently to the system utilize the drive as RAID-1 configuration or a mirror. Most often the included software in the external drive allows the customers to do this, but sometimes the user has to use the software of third party. This method is easy and advantageous as the customer gets backups (real time). And the disadvantage of this method is that the external drive runs constantly and is attached constantly to the system. Other mentality of the users of external drive is they connect the drive to backup data or photos. This method requires backup schedule because the backups may become nearly useless or quickly out of data. In this method, the user has advantage that he can store the external drive in a secure location off site from the computer. While the disadvantage of this method is that the data backups may not be up to data completely on any of the given day.

The external hard drives are portable, reliable and are fairly cheap. Their life expectancy is almost the same as that of the internal hard drives possibly if the external hard drives are not constantly connected to the computer. External hard drive’s most important benefit is that it can be separated from the system and can be stored any where else. The backup data in the external drive can be kept even safer by keeping the drive in off site location or in safe (fireproof). If the external drive remains connected to the system all the time, then it will be exposed to same threats as that of the computer like theft, fire etc. The external hard drives are vulnerable to be accidentally dropped or shock. External drives provide great solutions for data backup. The most important facility of the external drives is that they can be separated from the system between backups.

For further details and online order, please visit ‘tape4backup.com’

Pinky Mcbanon asked:


A USB Flash Drive is a miniature storage device just about the size of your thumb. A typical USB flash drive is about 1-4 inches long and is removable and usually, rewritable. A USB drive can have a capacity ranging from 64MB to 64GB, and the price varies with the capacity and features provided with the drive. USB flash drives have become the most popular portable storage solution and are preferred over other portable storage media like floppy drives.

USB (Universal Serial Bus) is a high-speed serial communication protocol used for communication between the computer and the USB flash drive. Connecting and disconnecting a USB flash drive is very simple. This drive can be connected to the computer by plugging it into the USB port. There are no other connectors or power cables required. The drive derives its power from the USB connector itself.

Whenever a USB flash drive is connected to the computer an icon indicating the presence of the drive is displayed in the system tray in a Computer running Windows Operating System. However, it is not advised to simply pull out the drive when you are done with it, you must stop the drive before you disconnect it and this can be done by right clicking the mouse over the USB drive icon in the system tray and stopping the device. Once the message asking you to disconnect the drive is displayed, the drive can be disconnected safely.

The computer treats a USB flash drive just like a hard disk, enabling you to perform all the actions that would normally be done in a hard disk. This includes file movement, modification, saving and deleting data and formatting.

Normally USB flash drives are available with FAT32 file system but they can be formatted to work with any Operating System that supports them.

However, defragmenting a USB flash drive is not advisable as it produces no significant improvement in performance and may actually reduce the life of the drive. This is because the drive uses EEPROM storage that can be written only a fixed number of times and the erasing and rewrite of data performed during defragmenting would shorten the life of the drive.

USB flash drives have several security related features built in to protect your data. It is common to see USB drives with write protection or with biometric security features like fingerprint recognition for a valid user. Since they are very small in size they may also come with provision for attaching a tag that makes it easier to carry.

The data stored in a USB flash drive can be stored reliably for as long as 2 years. They are very sturdy and dropping them does not cause you to lose data. The price to storage ratio is also very good. The downside of USB flash drives are that their small size makes it easy for them to be misplaced or lost or just forgotten. They are very sturdy and dropping them does not cause you to lose data.