History of USB Pen Drives

USB pen drive or flash drive uses a tiny PCB (Printed Circuit Board) to store large amounts of data and its data storage is based on EEPROM technology which has undergone many changes since it was first used. Although, the first ever pen drive which is also known as Thumb Drive was rolled out by Trek, a computer hardware manufacturing company in market in 2000, other companies developed and started to sell similar type of devices in the market during this period.

Early developments of Flash Drives

Between 1998 and 2001, SanDisk, which was formerly known as M-Systems, was involved in developing DiskOnKey and USB flash drive. M-Systems sold their USB type devices under the names like DiskOnKey and Diskey. In early 2000, Lexar, another company introduced some new features with their USB drives like Compact Flash, memory card reader and USB cable. These new features helped to access the data without using external USB devices like USB Hub.|

IBM was also a pioneer in USB flash drive and its documentation of the USB Flash drive and its functions helped the manufacturers to develop the pen drive and introduce new features. Initially, M-Systems worked closely with IBM and produced DiskOnKey for IBM before it introduced it in the commercial market in 2000. The first DiskOnKey had a capacity of 8 MB. Shimon Shmueli who was closely associated with IBM, launched his own company, KeyNetica. This company developed the small storage devices that can be used with PCs and can be convenient for easy transportation. Later, SanDisk bought the rights of manufacturing these devices and developed U3 and Ceedo, the advanced concepts of USB drives.