Data stored on flash drives is impervious to scratches and dust, and flash drives are mechanically very robust making them suitable for transporting data from place to place and keeping it readily at hand. Most personal computers support usb as of 2010. Flash drives also store data densely compared to many removable media. In mid-2009, 256 GB drives became available, with the ability to hold many times more data than a DVD or even a Blu-ray disc .
Compared to hard drives, flash drives use little power, have no fragile moving parts, and for low capacities are small and light. Flash drives implement the USB mass storage device class so that most modern operation stystems can read and write to them without installing device drivers. The flash drives present a simple block-structured logical unit to the host operating system, hiding the individual complex implementation details of the various underlying flash memory devices. The operating system can use any files system or block addressing scheme. Some computers can boot up from flash drives.
