I was introduced to USB (universal serial bus) drives last year but put off purchasing one until recently when we added a new computer to our home collection. Since then I’ve become a real convert and am rapidly converting many of my colleagues.

What is a USB drive? It’s a very small contraption about the size of your thumb – hence one of its nicknames “thumb drive”. Some other names are pen drive, flash drive, bstick and even dongle. Its main use is to transfer data from one computer to another, e.g. from work to home and vice versa, or from one computer without a printer to one with a printer.

It is fitted into a USB port which you’ll recognise by this symbol  . On newer PCs you can generally find the port (or ports) on the front of the hard drive but on our older machine at home it’s at the back. I leave the cable (included in the pack) attached to the back so I don’t have to get down on hands and knees every time I want to use it. My laptop has the ports at the side.

When you open “my computer” you’ll usually find a collection of drives: A for the floppies, C for the hard drive, D, E for CDs, and so on. With the USB drive inserted you may find “removable drive F (or another letter)” or a proprietary name such as (in my case) “EASYDISK”.

You can then save any work to this drive. What’s wrong with floppies you may ask. Well, the USB holds 64, 128, 256 or even more MB of memory. If you are just saving written text this may not matter but if you want to transfer photos, music, illustrated PowerPoint presentations etc, to another computer (perhaps one with a better printer or in a more convenient location), you’ll soon find your floppy is full and it seems a waste to burn a CD just for the transfer. I used to email things from work to myself at home or vice versa but when I couldn’t access CIT’s Webmail at home, as happened recently, that was the last straw for me and I went out and bought my USB drive.

Apparently you can do lots of other things, such as putting a password in to protect your data from prying eyes. However for me that’s not a problem so I’ll leave that to the experts.

My son occasionally borrows it. His CD burner wasn’t working so he transferred his music files to my laptop via the USB drive and burned the CDs there. Because my lap-top is not connected to the Internet the Easydrive is useful for transferring data from there. I’ve used it rather than (or in addition to) CDs for PowerPoint presentations because it allows for last minute changes. We have recently become attached to Smartboards in the ESL departments at CIT and the Easydrive has proved invaluable. We can prepare work for the Smartboard on our staffroom computers and carry it into the classroom on the pen drive.

How much does this little miracle cost? That depends on the memory, speed etc. You may think that 64MB will be fine but from my experience the more capacity the better. Recently my colleague bought a 256MB one for under $80 at a computer fair. It was Stephan Schmidt, chef extraordinaire and on-line skills deliverer of Culinary Skills at CIT who first introduced me to the USB drive (generally worn around the neck). He now has a special one attached to a wristwatch!

Adapted from ATESOL ACT Journal, June 2004