USB Key
Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files?
41–50 of 102 posts
Re: Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files?
#42"usb key"
Re: Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files?
#43In Brazil it's mostly Pen Drive.
Re: Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files?
#44Former colleague of mine, a technology reporter at Computerworld , got a letter from a company about 15 years ago demanding that he not use the term "thumb drive" in his articles unless it was referring to their product. It was a generic term by then, although they may have been trying to trademark it. He basically said "F that" and we continued to use "thumb drive." In the late 90s and early 00s we sometimes got req…
These are really obnoxious examples as they violate the rules of the language that exist for a reason. If you use an exclamation mark, you want to attract the attention of the reader to something for a reason. Similarly, there are rules for creating initialisms and acronyms and random capitalization changes are not part of them.
Re: Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files?
#45Thumb drive or flash drive for me, mostly.
My aunt, who was an Army Colonel, gave me the first one I ever had, which had a whopping 128 megabytes of storage capacity. This would have probably been in 2003ish.
She called it a "geek stick", which is a term I've never heard anyone else use.
Re: Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files?
#46"USB mass storage device" is the official technical name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_mass_storage_device_class
Your phone is also a "USB mass storage device" when you plug it into your computer.
Re: Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files?
#47Due to the ever increasing amount of Cybersecurity news, about 5 or so years ago my workmates started called it "the security hazard" - for example, "Hey Dave, can you pass me the security hazard? I need to transfer some big files to the Waterloo Exchange server and don't want to hit the network."
Re: Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files?
#48Forbidden stick. They are illegal in my company.
Re: Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files?
#49"USB mass storage device" is the official technical name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_mass_storage_device_class
Your phone is also a "USB mass storage device" when you plug it into your computer.
Usually it presents as an MTP device (and possibly also other types of device) these days. Phones haven't been USB mass storage devices for years, data corruption due to improper unmounting caused too many issues.
Re: Poll: What do you call the small USB device that you plug in to transfer files?
#50Some of these are very popular regionally. For example "Pen Drive" is almost universal in some parts of India, to the point that I've heard people say "PD"
Growing up in mainland China, everybody used "USB" and sometimes "U盘" which meant "U-drive" more or less