The Milestones of USB Flash Drive
Year 2000
Trek Technology and IBM began selling the first USB flash drives commercially in 2000 and sold a model under the brand name “ThumbDrive”, and IBM marketed the first such drives in North America with its product named the “DiskOnKey”, which was developed and manufactured by M-Systems.
Year 2003
By 2003, most USB flash drives had USB 2.0 connectivity, which has 480 Mbit/s as the transfer rate upper bound; after accounting for the protocol overhead that translates to a 35 MB/s effective throughput. That is considerably slower than what a hard disk drive or solid-state drive can achieve when connected via the SATA interface.
Year 2008
Like USB 2.0 before it, USB 3.0 dramatically improved data transfer rates compared to its predecessor. It was announced in late 2008, but consumer devices were not available until the beginning of 2010. The USB 3.0 interface specifies transfer rates up to 5 Gbit/s (625 MB/s), compared to USB 2.0’s 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s).
Year 2014
All USB 3.0 devices are backwards compatible with USB 2.0 ports. As of April 2014, computers with USB 3.0 ports are common; most newer laptops and desktops have at least one such port. USB 3.0 port expansion cards are available to upgrade older systems, and many newer motherboards feature two or more USB 3.0 ports available through PCB headers.
Year 2015
As of March 2015, some manufacturers have announced USB 3.1 type-C flash drives with reading/write speeds of around 530 MB/s.
Source From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia