Pen Drive storage devices have proved themselves to be a very practical and robust mobile storage method, far surpassing anything that has gone before. For the most part these devices are very reliable as they rely on solid state technology and therefore have no moving parts, which is a big bonus.

This doesn’t explain the huge number of failures noted in recent months, in fact the whole of the data recovery industry seem to be focusing a lot of attention in the USB Memory Stick Recovery sector, but why should good old trustworthy Flash Memory require such devoted attention?

USB storage devices are also dropping in cost all of the time. They are growing in popularity at such a rate that the number of devices shipped in 2007 was double that shipped in 2006. By the end of 2008, annual sales are estimated to be in the region of 300 million shipped units.