Thumb drive

A thumb drive, or USB flash drive', is a small device which can be inserted into a USB port in a computer or other electronic device in order to provide storage or transfer of data. It resembles a disk drive to the computer, but has no moving parts. They are widely used due to their compact size (smaller than a floppy disk or CD) and high storage capacity (as much as 256 gigabytes now, with terabyte-sized thumb drives in the works for the future). The memory is nonvolatile, so it will hold its data indefinitely just like a disk, and is freely readable and writable like a floppy or hard disk.

Many varieties of thumb drives exist with different data capacities.