Storage device/Flash drive

[leco]

Forgive my ignorance but what's the difference between a USB that presents as a Storage Device and one that displays Flash Drive?

 

I collected some USB sticks at Bett and two of them are Flash Drives. Does it depend on what's on them perhaps?

[Ric_]

Is it not just a volume name?

[Michael]

Isn't a storage device more of a hard drive? I agree though generally it's just different terminology.

[SYNACK]

Flash drives can be formatted to look like either hard drives or USB drives, it depends on how the initial sectors are written as to how it shows up. The tools that come with UBCD4Win allow you to reformat a USB drive as a hard drive so that it can show up and be partitioned in a way to allow certain types of booting. Hardware wise there is no difference, it is all down to the initial sections of the memory as to how it shows up.

[leco]

So in theory I should be able to reformat the "Flash Drives" to make them into Storage devices? Do I need anything special to do that?

[SYNACK]

Yes, the other benifit is that you can have multiple partitions on a usb drive and make them bootable more easily. The 'flip removable bit' button on this app Lexar tool makes creating bootable USB flash drives easy should manage it in a single click. I'd backup the stick beforehand though if you have anything critical on it.

[pwds]

Often encrypted memory sticks or U3 drives will have a "CD" partition on the drive which emulates a CD drive, presumably to make drives bootable in systems with a modern BIOS, I imagine this is the same method although I've never tested this.

 

Thinking about it Ubuntu has a USB version which presumably also uses this for installation.