Can We Use Pen Drive In Place Of Hard Disk Of A Computer ?

Ofcourse we can. why not? It is not very different from hard disk. The driving software of any computer is operating system. In both pen drive and hard disk you can install an OS. However by saying that it would not be easy to replace hard disk with pen drive for various reasons like security, durability so on and forth. Most of the work places donot allow you to take even a single file out of office premises and think what will happen when we replace pendrive with hard drive. However we should not challenge technology. Who knows what next is.

not really pen drives have limited read write cycles even though they are in the millions pen drives have a more higher rate of failure then hard disks data is very hard to recover from the pen drives as they are single parts ie a chip n restoring is hard pen drives ARE SLOWER TEHN HARD DISKs so tht will limit the speed of ur computer it will make the programs load slower n save slower it may also create drag some internal hard disks have speeds upto 10000 rpm. try those and HDD's are cheaper

I use mine as an external storage device in a very simular way that i used to use a floppy disk. I dont think it will ever replace a hard disk but can be a very usefull addition to it blessed be

I think it is possible to make USB drive as the main drive, but the main problem is USB drive isn't as safe as harddisk. USB drive is very weak if we compare it to harddisk. With harddisk, not only our data is safe but also live longer.

My dear friend ,it is possible to boot system from usb drive ,now i have a backup system in my usb drive ,when my desktop computer system is infecked with virus , i recover it right now ,it is very convenient ,but you have to reset your BIOS

Actually booting an OS from pendrive is quite simple thing to do. I have tried with windows 98,2000 and linux. The problem with pendrive is the data transfer rate is significantly slower and doesnt have any data protection algorithm as in a harddrive. Even the so called SSD is not gonna become a reality up to the next decade. Just use HDD it will here for a long time

I would assume you could but why would any one want to do that? Like other people have said it would be much slower and if you just want mobility you can put the data on the flash drive or buy an eternal hard drive.

you know,i'm not sure. your system would have to recognize it as the master drive,and it'd have to be large enough to run windows/linux/whatever.if you could do both,theoretically it's possible..

Hi there. I think it is very possible to use a pen drive as the hard disk of a computer. The problem with that is, a pen drive uses a USB slot and the speed of the USB slot is still slow compared to IDE and SATA cables used for standard hard drives. But nowadays, there are companies that are using the solid state memory technology of pen drives as primary, internal hard drives. It does sound like a good idea to have an operating system on your pen drive but I think the booting time would be very slow.

That is a good question that requires further research. There are linux distributions that operate only from a cd. I guess it depends of how sophistcated you need your operating system as they have bloated from a kilobytes in the old dos operating system to vista which is way bigger. The poster says Asus eee runs only on flash memory I believe is correct, I do not know how big the flash memory is that it uses, more questions for research. Does vista not use the flash memory pens as additional RAM? I thought I read that somewhere. The pens seem to be getting larger, just like the old hard drives kept getting larger every few months. Now hard drives are up to 1 tb and larger. I see USB pen drives are now up to 64 GB. I acutally used a windows 98 computer with about a 5 gb hard drive and it was considered large in its day.

well Mr.GANESH i rely i don't have the relevant answer for your question, but there's is one thing which you can do with your pen drive you can your pen drive for booting your PC,its gives a lot of security to Ur data's.......

Yes, you can run an OS off of a flash drive (Particularly Linux. Windows is a different can of worms, though). While you can do it, it isn't recommended, because flash drives have limited read/write cycles. tmp files and swap files (particularly on Linux, as windows doesn't have a specific location for tmp) can eat through cycles very quickly, and will most likely kill the flash drive very quickly.

aren't the subnotebooks that are available right now use this kind of storage (like the asus eee)? but i think it will affect the speed. i have files/dbase that i back up in a flash drive and it takes more time for a good sized file in a flash drive than a regular hardisk.

I don't think so.

You Hve Put Me Through an intelligent question Mr.Ganesh..and the answer is yes..An Indian company has developed a pen drive which has operating system inside it..but its quite expensive and its only the test run..actually the software costs around 10,000 with your preffered operating system and 16Gb pen drive..

Even before the advent of 16Gb pen drives there have been computer technicians using pen drives as s trouble shooting tool. Currently we can find software made specifically for installation on a pen drive. This include a browser and an office suite. A pen drive uses flash RAM. At present there are digital equipment using flash RAM. I remember reading somewhere about flash RAMs replacing hard disks. Happy computing.

i thing we cant use pendrive as ur hard disk but u can store data in ur pendrive and u can retrieve that data at any time....same as like ur hard disk...but we cant use pendrive instead of hard disk

A pen drive/thumb drive is just a solid state memory device. A number of computers on the market have already done away with traditional hard drives in favour of these solid state drives, and there is no technical treason that USB ones can't be used in the same way. Some operating systems are available on USB drives (including at least on Linux implementation), but the major manufacturers generally do not like them, and set up their systems so they will only function if they find key programs on the local hard drive. That will change!