Other Portable Drives

Flash drives and tiny hard drives are also available in packages that use other methods to connect to your computer. CompactFlash cards, Secure Digital cards, Sony Memory Sticks, and Microdrives are just a few of the forms that digital cameras and audio recorders use to store files. Other portable drives are mounted inside PC Cards that fit the PCMCIA sockets on most laptop systems. Like USB drives, Windows treats these media as removable drives with temporary drive letters, so you can also use them to read and write any other data files that you want to move between computers.

Some laptop computers come with built-in readers for flash media. For other computers, add-on readers are available as separate USB devices and as units that fit into an external drive bay in a desktop or laptop computer. Most readers have sockets for several popular types of flash media.