Specifications

7
REFERENCE GUIDE TO FLASH CARDS AND DRIVES
Memorex has long been one of the world’s foremost suppliers of media for memory storage. The
very name of the company is a shortened form of “MEMORy EXcellence” that started in 1961 with
the manufacture of half-inch 9-track computer tape and progressed to audio and video cassettes,
digital audio cassettes, and computer diskettes. As technology developed, Memorex expanded to
optical storage media such as recordable and rewritable CDs and DVDs and has become one of
the world’s leading suppliers. Now, as the long-promised age of solid-state memory storage has
expanded to familiar consumer products, Memorex offers a number of USB-based flash memory
storage drives. Memorex believes that many of our customers are curious to know more about the
products they are using. In our commitment to “memory excellence,” we hope to explain the
technology behind the products we sell, particularly the very latest products. The Memorex
Reference Guide to Flash Media explains these solid-state storage media in simple, non-technical
language. Very technical information that may be of interest only to the most interested readers
appears in the green-shaded passages.
People simply cannot remember everything they want to recall over the course of time, so they
make a “record” of it, a word that means “remember by heart.” Our hearts are no more reliable
than our brains; so our records are stored elsewhere on various media, each of which has
advantages and disadvantages. The first media were cave walls, wonderful for permanence but
lacking in portability. Stones, papyrus, parchment, and paper all replaced cave walls as more
portable and accessible if less durable media, but each medium lacked a fundamental property
long desired by anyone committing data to a record—the ability to easily change the data to
account for mistakes, changes, or additions. That ability came with magnetic media: tapes and
discs that could be easily altered without destroying the integrity of the earlier information.
Magnetic media have been the chief type of memory storage for the last sixty years; but they are
prone to damage from unintentional magnetic fields, misalignment of moving parts, and wear.
Optical media such as CD-RWs and rewritable DVDs have avoided most, but not all of the wear
problems by using light to read stored information. (Wear in the form of severe scratches from
rough handling can still threaten the data). These discs still rely on the mechanical accuracy of
laser tracking servomotors and drive motor speeds to store and retrieve our data. The ideal has
long been a medium with no moving parts at all: solid-state memory in a small, portable, protected
format with great storage capacity. Flash media have finally achieved that ideal, but with little
fanfare and recognition. In the entire history of recording media, flash memory is one of the most
amazing achievements; but in our insatiable desire for greater storage capacity, we often overlook
these tiny memory cards. People most often discover them first when they invest in a digital
camera, but the features they offer make them wonderfully suited for a wide variety of applications.
Sooner or later, flash media will become a common form of memory storage in everyday life.
These cards use digital technology, as do so many of today’s technological advances. The world
has quickly accepted “digital” as a distinction of superior technology and quality, often without fully
understanding what it means in everyday products. Long familiar items such as cameras and
televisions are being “digitized”; and although most people know that digital products can be used
in conjunction with their computers, they are not wholly comfortable with what digital truly means.