- [Instructor] All right, let's talk about
flash-based drives.
Most manufacturers of flash-based drives
use non-volatile NAND,
or N-A-N-D flash memory.
This is the most common.
So the solid state drives that we showed
in the previous sublesson will use that,
and other types of flash drives will use them as well.
For example, the USB flash drive,
this is probably the most familiar
of all flash media out there,
also known as USB thumb drives.
They're often retractable and can be carried on a key chain.
And you can see here,
this is an image of a USB flash drive connected to a laptop.
Notice that the USB flash drive is lit.
And that means it's connected to the USB port,
and it's ready to transfer data.
And this drive will show up in your
Windows Explorer or File Explorer
as whatever volume name you gave it.
You know, I might call mine flashy or something like that.
So, you know, it's good to give it a good name,
so you can differentiate from that drive,
amongst that drive and the other drives in your system.
Remember when you are done with the drive,
you don't wanna just disconnect it,
you wanna safely remove the hardware
from the operating system,
before you physically disconnect the drive.
So you do that in the notification area within Windows,
and you do that from the safely remove icon,
looks like a little USB icon,
and you might have to click on the little double arrow
in the notification area to get that.
And just watch out because all your drives
will probably be listed there.
Any of your solid state drives,
your CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, Blu-ray, that kind of thing.
Just make sure you're actually disconnecting
the right drive.
That's why it's good to name it.
So USB flash drives, a very common device.
Another common type of flash-based drive
is the SD card or secure digital card.
And technically these are basically the same
as a USB flash drive.
They're solid state, they use NAND memory,
and have most of the same pros and cons
as a USB flash drive,
but the difference is the form factor,
and therefore the usage for this device.
You know, you can't connect this directly to a USB port.
It's meant to be inserted inside of some type of device.
So here we have a standard size SD card
and also a micro SD card.
And these two are used usually
for some type of mobile device.
The larger size you might be in a camera, or a camcorder,
or a little audio player, or what have you.
And the smaller size you'll often use, that micro size,
for add-ons as memory for your smartphone
or another small device like that.
Let's show both of these now,
and show some examples and adapters
that you can use as well.
All right, so here we have a couple examples of devices.
The first is the USB flash drive, and this is a SanDisk,
and it's a 16 gig,
and you can see that it is retractable,
and it kind of locks into place,
and it'll light up when you do plug it into USB port.
So that's the USB flash drive.
And then we have a couple SD cards.
Here's the standard SD,
and you can see the connectors here.
Whenever you're handling these
try not to touch the connectors, very important.
And here's a micro SD card.
So very small might be tough to handle,
but again, stay off the connectors if you can.
And so you can really see the difference in size here.
This is your standard USB flash drive,
though nowadays they make much smaller ones
that might just be this big
and be as much as 64 gigabyte so,
and you could lose them very easily,
so watch out for that.
But you can see the size difference
between the three of these.
Now with these, you'll usually use these SD cards,
you know, on a smart phone or something,
or on a digital camera or camcorder.
But how can you move the data to your computer?
Well, if you don't have wireless,
or some type of option on your camera or other device,
you'll need to connect this into the system.
And if you don't have an SD slot,
you'll need to use some type of adapter such as this.
This is a little SD to USB adapter.
I'll just take the cap off and show this here.
And you can see you have a full-size SD slot,
and a micro SD slot,
and you have a USB connector
just to connect to the computer.
So we could connect this or this and read that data
right through the USB.
And usually if you're dealing with big files,
you know, audio or video,
you probably wanna get yourself a USB 3.0 device.
So you can, you know, move the data a lot faster.
Otherwise if you have USB 2.0,
you're gonna be waiting forever to get those files across.
Now, what if you don't have this micro SD?
Well there's a couple options.
This is a little miniature micro SD adapter,
which goes to USB,
or you could use an adapter such as this.
This actually is not a SD card, it's an adapter,
and you can plug your smaller size micro SD
directly into that,
and then that could be plugged into a slot such as this.
But I like these, this is a Transcend adapter.
And, you know, these are the two most common SD cards
I'm gonna use,
the standard size and the micro.
So this has those two, so it works great for me.
And I have these cards in like,
five or six different devices.
So I'm constantly moving these about into this device to,
you know, copy the data over to my audio video system.
So there's a couple examples of some adapters
and also the USB flash drive and the SD cards
that you'll see out there.
Another type of flash-based drive is
the CF card or CompactFlash card.
Another type of solid state memory
that you might see used in handheld computers
or high-end cameras or micro drives.
And they're broken up into two different types.
There's type one cards that are 3.3 millimeters thick,
and those are used for say, cameras, handheld computers,
and then type two cards that are five millimeters thick,
and might be used for micro drives.
These have been pretty much overshadowed by the SD card,
but you might still see them out there.
Common capacities for CF cards
usually max out at 32 gigabyte,
though the technology can go further.
Speeds are generally between
six and 133 megabytes per second,
but that could go as high as 167 megabytes per second
with the CF version six standard.
So CF cards, you might see them in some devices,
but generally it's gonna be more the SD card.
And another type is eMMC.
MMC or the multimedia card standard
was the original card standard before SD cards.
And nowadays, we have embedded MMC,
and your smartphone or your tablet
might just use embedded MMC for its main storage.
And it can transfer somewhere in the neighborhood
of 400 megabytes per second.
But this has been replaced in some cases by the SD card,
and for additional storage,
you'll almost always use SD cards.
So there's some of your flash-based drives.
You got USB flash drives,
SD cards, CF cards, and eMMC.
So know the basics for each of those for the exam.