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 has caused a great shock to the entire storage industry. Including Israeli M-Systems, 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 February 7, 2004, 65438, 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 is the world's first inventor of USB flash drive. On February 10, 2006, American time, Netac entrusted Morgan Lewis, an American lawyer, to file a complaint in the U.S. federal court for the Eastern District of Texas, accusing PNY of infringing Netac's U.S. patent (U.S. Pat.No. US6829672). 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 hard disk of the present era, or the maximum transmission rate that USB2.0 can provide, it is still a little worse. At present, the highest transfer rate is about 20-40MB/s, while the general file transfer rate is about 100 MB/s, and the transfer rate of older 12Mbit/s devices is only about 1MB/s at most. Among them, the industry leaders are Netac Shenzhen, M-Systems and Trek Singapore.