USB flash drives offer potential advantages over other portable storage devices, particularly the floppy disk. They are more compact, faster, hold much more data, are more reliable for lack of moving parts, and have a more durable design. Additionally, it has become increasingly common for computers to ship 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 be faster than an optical disc drive, while storing a comparable amount of data in a much smaller space.
With nothing being mechanically driven in a flash drive, the name is something of a misnomer. It is called a "drive" because it appears to the computer operating system (and the user) in a manner identical to a mechanical disk drive, and is accessed in the same way.
