Why cant pen drives replace hard disc in PCs?
There are many differences between pen drives (PD) and hard drives (HDD) that does not allow this. 1. Pen drives connect to the computer via USB, while HDDs connect via Parallel ATA (Ultra ATA) or Serial ATA (SATA) buses. The maximum transfer speed with USB 2.0 reaches about 2 MB/s while Ultra ATA drives reach a transfer speed at about 10-20MB/s while with SATA drives can reach up to 30-50MB/s. Now then with the transfer speed being low, a 1 GB pen drive copying @ 2 MB/s would take about 9 minutes to fill, in the same time (9 minutes) an Ultra ATA drive would copy 8.1 GB (8 times as many). 2. PDs have only limited storage capacity (now up to 2 GBs) but HDDs now have the storage capacity of up to 1TB (1024 GB). IF you could produce a 1 TB pen drive it would take 2 and a half days to fill. 3. PDs do not store the information the same way as HDDs do (magnetically), rather they store it like RAM memories do, only they are non-volatile, and therefore information on them wouldn’t stay on in
