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USB Flash Drives
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USB flash drives offer potential advantages over other portable storage devices, particularly the floppy disk. They have a more compact shape, operate faster, hold much more data, have a more durable design, and operate more reliably due to their lack of moving parts. Additionally, it has become increasingly common for computers to be sold without floppy disk drives. USB ports, on the other hand, appear on almost every current mainstream PC and laptop. These types of drives use the USB mass storage standard, supported natively by modern operating systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix-like systems. USB drives with USB 2.0 support can also operate faster than an optical disc drive, while storing a larger amount of data in a much smaller space.
Nothing actually moves in a flash drive: the term drive persists because computers read and write flash-drive data using the same system commands as for a mechanical disk drive, with the storage appearing to the computer operating system and user interface as just another drive.
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DVDs (Digital Versatile Discs)
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DVD, also known as "Digital Versatile Disc" or "Digital Video Disc," is an optical disc storage media format. Its main uses are video and data storage. DVDs are of the same dimensions as compact discs (CDs) but store more than six times as much data.
Variations of the term DVD often describe the way data is stored on the discs: DVD-ROM (Read Only Memory), has data that can only be read and not written, DVD-R and DVD+R can record data only once and then function as a DVD-ROM. DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM can both record and erase data multiple times.
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Linux Live Drives
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A live USB is a USB flash drive or a USB external hard disk drive containing a full operating system which can be booted. Live USBs are closely related to live CDs, but typically have the ability to save settings and permanently install software packages back onto the USB device. Like live CDs, live USBs can be used for system administration, data recovery, or the testing of operating system distributions without committing to a permanent installation on the local hard disk drive.
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