If you don’t know what the jump drive is and want to find some information about it, then you should read this post offered by MiniTool carefully. You can also know how the jump drive works as well as the differences between jump drive and flash drive.

There are a large number of different kinds of storage devices that you can use. And the most commonly used storage devices are HDD and SSD while the portable storage device is the USB flash drive. And there is a storage device of the same type as the USB flash drive called jump drive.

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What Is a Jump Drive?

To begin with, what is a jump drive? A jump drive is a plug-and-play portable storage device and also knows as a USB flash drive, pen drive, key chain drive. It uses flash memory and is lightweight enough to attach to a key chain.

jump drive

A jump drive possesses the size of a human thumb and can replace a floppy disk, Zip drive disk, or CD. What’s more, it can be used to transfer data from one device to another by connecting through the USB port on a device.

Tip: You may find that your USB port is not working, then you can read this post – If Your USB Port Not Working, These Solutions Are Available

The storage capacities of the jump drive are ranging from 8 MB to 2 GB, which is depending on the manufacturers, and the price range is corresponding.

How Does Jump Drive Work?

When you plug the jump drive to your USB port, then your operating system recognizes the device as a removable drive and assigns it a drive letter. The biggest difference between it and other removable storage devices is that the jump drive does not need restarting after it is attached, does not need batteries or an external power supply, and is not platform dependent.

When using a jump drive, the data can be retained for a long time if the jump drive is unplugged from the computer or the drive is retained after the computer is powered off. This makes jump drives convenient for transferring data between desktop computers and notebooks, as well as short-term backups of small to moderate quantities of data.

There are some jump drive manufacturers that provide additional features such as password protection, and downloadable drivers that allow the keychain drive to be compatible with old systems that don’t possess USB ports.

If you have the correct driver for any version of Windows running on your old PC, you may be able to get the jump drive to work. However, many flash drives are not available for Windows 95 or earlier. Some won’t even work on the original Windows 98.

In many of these older PCs, USB support is very limited, so obvious solutions using certain USB devices (such as flash drives, external hard drives, CD-R, or some other device) may not work properly.

However, there are some methods you can take so that you can use the USB device. For example, install a network card in the old PC so that it can be networked with the new PC. Another option is to remove the hard drive from the old computer and place it in a USB enclosure. You can then plug it into your new PC and use it as an external drive.

You may be able to connect your old drive directly to your new PC, but most new drives use the new Serial ATA attachment instead of the old IDE attachment. In this case, you still need to purchase an adapter to use it. Another option is to buy a USB floppy drive for your new PC.

Jump Drive VS Flash Drive

In fact, jump drives and flash drives are the same devices with different names. The only difference worth mentioning is that flash drives have flash non-volatile storage media. This flash memory is also used in other storage devices such as solid-state drives, memory cards, etc.

Tip: You may be interested in this post – A Step-by-Step Tutorial on How to Use a Flash Drive on PC.

Bottom Line

To sum up, this post gives you detailed information about what the jump drive is and how it works. What’s more, you can also get some information about jump drive vs flash drive.

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