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# What is a Flash Drive?
* April 8, 2022
**Table Of Contents**
show
 [1
History of USB Flash Drives
 [2
Invention of the Flash Drive
 [2.1
Who Invented the Flash Drive?
 [3
What to Do When a Flash Drive is not Recognized?
A flash drive is mechanical equipment that you can use to store information from computers. Sometimes the flash drive is thought of as being similar to a hard drive. This is the part of your computer that stores all the information. Unlike hard drives, flash drives are smaller in size, which adds to their portability and allows you to easily carry them inside your pocket.
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Kingston 8GB Flash Drive
Furthermore, flash drives are static which means that they do not need any power to run on. You do not need to have an electrical cord to plug them in. However, you still need a computer in order to use them, which means that they are not stand-alone devices.
The end of the flash drive that plugs into the computer is a USB interface, which stands for Universal Serial Bus. The USB end is the portal that allows for the transfer of information between the computer and the flash drive. Inside of the rubber or plastic casing of the USB, you will find flash memory chips that store information.
The reason why you call this device a flash drive is because it does not have any moving parts. It only consists of data merged into a drive and it stays there. There are many different types of flash drives and they come in various shapes. Their memory can range from 256 megabytes to 2 terabytes (equivalent to 2000 GB or 2000000 megabytes).
You can store thousands of photos, audio files, videos and more. Some USB’s come with an extractable SD card attached to the back of it. Overall, flash drives are incredibly useful, secure, and easy to use.
## History of USB Flash Drives
USB flash drives revolutionized data storage. Before the rise of cloud computing, flash drive data storage was extremely popular in early 2000s. Its portability, speed, and size of storage made it an incredible invention.
Some of the initial standards for connecting devices to computers were serial and parallel ports. Parallel ports meant that multiple bits of data could be sent in parallel. The more common connection for this type of standard was seen in the printer port. This port existed from the 1970s all the way up to the early 2000s.
This connector was rather large and the bulky cables were not easily portable. The serial standard helped users transfer data one bit at a time in serial. Many standards of protocol today happen to fit the definition of serial connection. When most people say serial connection, they are typically referring to the RS232 standard. Today, many servers and industrial services still use the serial standard.
Overall, there were many standards that came for data transfer and storage, but none of them matched the portability and speed of the USB. The USB was developed around the same time as FireWire. The objective of the USB invention was to unify the similar connectors together.
Unlike FireWire, a USB does not need a dedicated host device to operate, which led to USB A and B being separate connectors to differentiate connectors. USB also differs from FireWire because it can handle up to 127 devices. USB 1.0 debuted in 1995 at 12 mega bits per second, which was a great improvement from the previous devices.
USB 1.1 came shortly after, which could still do 12 megabits per second, but also 1.5 mega bits per second for smaller and more efficient device operations. USB 2.0 came during the year 2000 at a whopping 480 megabits per second. USB devices that use any of these standards were fully forwards and backwards compatible, operating at the speed of the lowest link on the chain.
USB 2.0 also paved the way for a much more powerful delivery, which contributed to the first mini and micro computers. When USB flash drives came into existence, they changed the game for portable storage as they were a small, plug and play, and rewritable device. As time passed, USBs came with an extra set of pins that facilitated higher speeds. Today, USB type C expands on the universal vision and expands on the one connector to rule them all.
## Invention of the Flash Drive
Before the USB flash drive existed, there were floppy disks, which had a minimum storage capacity of 80KB. Since this was a magnetic storage, it used the electromagnetic interference to function. The flash drive was a solution to the limited capacity and slow mechanism of the earlier storage devices. The first patent of the flash drive came about in 1999 by an Israeli company known as M-systems.
### Who Invented the Flash Drive?
In December 15 2000, IBM systems and Disk-in-Key collaborated to create the flash drive. The advanced version of the flash drive was brought forward by Phua Khein as a single chip item. In 2000, he opened his own company and a patent known as pen drive came about which led to the USB flash drive you see today.
## What to Do When a Flash Drive is not Recognized?
If your USB device is not recognized on your windows desktop, then you will first have to go to the search bar, then type Windows PowerShell. Once you have selected this option, then type in some commands to the dashboard that opens. Once you have done that, the system will try to troubleshoot the problem. After that, you will have to go to the device manager and right click on the USB route hub. You can search the internet and find out the various methods that you can try when it comes to resolving flash drive related issues.
##### JB Larson
JB Larson is technologist passionate about researching data storage devices, educating clients about technology, and playing the piano when he's not working.
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# How the Monolith Changed the USB Flash Drive Data Recovery Game
* May 26, 2015
The one thing  had going for it was easy direct access to the underlying storage medium. Inside the casing of that USB thumb drive or camera card is an industry-standard NAND flash memory chip. Whereas hard disk  can realistically only be read by the drive that recorded to them, that memory chip can be removed from the circuit board and read by any number of device programmers available online. The real challenge is turning that raw memory dump into something useful. What you get directly from the memory chip looks nothing like what your PC sees when the drive is plugged in a USB port. Instead, it looks more like a jigsaw puzzle spread out on your coffee table. Intermixed with user data are bits of information the drive uses for its own internal operation. To get at individual files, this information must be stripped, error correction codes applied, and finally all the pieces reassembled in the correct order.
Imagine our dismay the first time we opened the case of a failed USB thumb drive to find something like this staring back at us.
In the image on the left you will see the internals of a traditional USB thumb drive. The large chip on the right is standard NAND flash memory, which can be removed and read with a device programmer.
Above the traditional USB drive, you see a monolithic thumb drive.
What the heck is this?!?! Well, that, sports fans, is the latest craze- a monolithic USB thumb drive or “monolith” for short. Instead of many discrete components installed together on a circuit board, many flash drives today contain what appears to be a single chip with four gold fingers to plug into a USB port. The monolith has many things going for it- smaller size, water-proof, and cheaper to manufacture (I imagine, as this seems to be the sole driving force behind every innovation in the storage industry these days).
Comparison between monolithic chip (top) and non-monolithic flash drive (bottom)
NAND chips started showing up in the flash drives and memory cards that arrived in our data recovery lab, our engineers had to figure out how to retrieve the data from these devices. After a lot of hard work, we developed a method to access the chips and successfully read and understand their contents.
In this video Greg Andrzejewski, Gillware’s Director of Research & Development, goes in-depth about data recovery from monolith USB drives.
##### gwadmin
# Monolithic Flash Drives
* July 21, 2022
What is a Monolithic Flash Drive?
What Came Before Monolithic Flash Drives?
Definitions Related to Monolithic Flash Drives
 [3.1
NAND Flash
 [3.2
USB
 [3.3
USB Controller
 [4
Monolithic Flash Drive Data Recovery
Have you ever seen a flash drive where the USB connector was built-in to the rest of the device? That was (almost certainly) a monolithic flash drive.
## What is a Monolithic Flash Drive?
Monolithic flash drives are simply a one-piece upgrade to existing USB flash storage architecture. Earlier variants of USB flash drives utilized distinct components such as a USB controller chip, a USB connector interface, a NAND flash storage chip, and an outer casing often made of plastic or metal. Monolithic flash drives serve as their own cases, and eliminate the need for USB controllers.
Monolithic flash drives offer similar utility to earlier varieties, with a notable disadvantage when it comes to …
Monoliths can also be produced in an efficient and cost effective manner. The reduction in cost, relative to that of assembling flash drives with distinct components, enables storage hardware manufacturers to offer customers increased value.
As such, monolithic flash drives have seen a significant increase in popularity over the late 2010s and early ’20s.
---
## What Came Before Monolithic Flash Drives?
The device in this photo provides an excellent example of what proceeded monolithic flash drives. The flash drive pictured in this image clearly displays a metal USB connector that is certainly not the same material as the outer casing or the printed circuit board (PCB), as well as two clearly identifiable integrated circuits attached to the printed circuit board. The larger of these chips is the , and the smaller is what’s known as a USB controller.
Notice how the  connector snapped away from the controller / PCB. Data recovery from devices like this was a matter of successfully identifying and communicating with the .
Once our engineers had access to the controller, they could pass information between the (often) heavily damaged initial storage device and a replacement storage medium.
The monolithic USB flash drive complicated this process.
## Definitions Related to Monolithic Flash Drives
### NAND Flash
NAND is a term in formalized logic that stands for not and. NAND flash storage is the technology with a wide variety of applications in the modern tech landscape. Some applications of NAND flash are in the nonvolatile memory / storage of: mobile phones, tablets, solid state hard drives, flash drives, and SD cards.
### USB
USB is an acronym for universal serial bus, which is a standardization of protocols, connectors, and cables for connecting computers to peripheral devices (including electronic storage devices).
### USB Controller
USB Controllers are miniscule computers that exist exclusively on an integrated circuit. They are responsible for enabling your computer to read and write data to various USB storage devices.
## Monolithic Flash Drive Data Recovery
Monolithic flash drives utilize 3D integrated circuits to replace the functionality provided by USB controllers (passing data between a computer and NAND flash storage).
If you think  sound like a complicated topic, you are correct. This concept is why monolithic flash drive data recovery is one of the more challenging varieties of data recovery we see at Gillware.
As you can see in this section’s photo, reading data from a monolithic flash drive that suffered physical / logical damage is a timely, complicated, delicate, and difficult procedure. While this process is difficult, it is not impossible. If you lost data from a monolithic flash drive, the data recovery professionals at Gillware are always happy to help.