From 1998 to 2000, many companies claimed that they were the first to invent USB flash drives. Include China Netac Technology, Israeli M-Systems and Singapore Trek Company. However, the real patent for the basic invention of U disk is China Netac. In July 2002, Netac's "Flash electronic external storage method and device for data processing system" (patent number: ZL 99 1 17225.6) was officially authorized by China National Intellectual Property Administration. This patent fills the gap of invention patent in the field of computer storage in China for 20 years. The acquisition of this patent right caused a great shock to the entire storage industry, including the Israeli M-Systems Company immediately filed an invalid reexamination with China National Intellectual Property Administration, China, which once became a patent dispute that shocked China and foreign countries in the global flash memory field. However, on June 7, 2004, Netac obtained the basic invention patent of flash disk officially authorized by the US National Patent Office, with the US patent number of US6829672. The acquisition of this patent right finally ended the struggle. China Netac was the first person to invent USB flash drive in the world. On February 10, 2006, US time, Netac entrusted American lawyer Morgan Lewis to file a complaint with the US Federal Court for the Eastern District of Texas, accusing PNY of infringing Netac's US patent (US Patent No.6,829,672). In February 2008, Netac and PNY reached an out-of-court settlement. Netac signed a patent license agreement with PNY, and PNY paid Netac a patent license fee of $654.38+million. This is the first time that a China enterprise has obtained a huge patent license fee in the United States, which further proves that Netac is the global inventor of U disk.
Now all flash drives support USB2.0 standard; However, due to the technical limitation of NAND flash memory, their reading and writing speed can not reach the maximum transmission speed of 480Mbit/s supported by the current standard. At present, the fastest flash drive has used dual-channel controller, but compared with the current generation of hard disks, or the maximum transmission rate that USB2.0 can provide, it is still a little worse. At present, the highest transmission rate is about 20-40MB/s, while the general file transmission rate is about100 MB/s. The transmission rate of the older "full speed" 12mbit/s devices is only about 1MB/s at most. Among them, the industry leaders are Netac Shenzhen, M-Systems and Trek Singapore.