Invention History
From 1998 to 2000, many companies claimed to be the first to invent the USB flash drive. Including China's Netac Technology, Israel's M-Systems, and Singapore's Trek. But it was China Netac that actually obtained the basic invention patent for USB flash drives. In July 2002, Netac's "fast electronic storage method and device for data processing systems" (Patent No.: ZL 99 1 17225.6) was officially authorized by the State Intellectual Property Office. This patent fills the gap in invention patents in the field of computer storage in China in the past 20 years. The acquisition of this patent caused great shock in the entire storage industry. Israel's M-Systems immediately filed an invalidation review with the State Intellectual Property Office of China, which once became a patent dispute that shocked both China and foreign countries in the global flash memory field. However, on December 7, 2004, Netac received the flash disk basic invention patent officially authorized by the US National Patent Office, US Patent No. US6829672. The acquisition of this patent finally ended the competition. China Netac is the world's first inventor of USB flash drives. On February 10, 2006, U.S. time, Netac entrusted American lawyer Morgan Lewis to submit a complaint to the U.S. Federal Court for the Eastern District of Texas, accusing the U.S. company PNY of infringing Netac's U.S. patent (U.S. Patent No. US6829672). In February 2008, Netac and PNY reached an out-of-court settlement. Netac signed a patent licensing agreement with PNY, and PNY paid patent licensing fees of US$10 million to Netac. This is the first time that a Chinese company has received huge patent licensing fees in the United States. It also further proves that Netac is the global inventor of USB flash drives.
Today’s flash drives all support the USB2.0 standard; however, due to technical limitations of NAND flash memory, their read and write speeds are currently unable to reach the maximum transmission speed of 480Mbit/s supported by the standard. The fastest flash drives currently use dual-channel controllers, but they are still far behind the current era of hard drives or the maximum transfer rate that USB2.0 can provide. The current highest transfer rate is about 20-40MB/s, while the general file transfer speed is about 10MB/s. Older 12Mbit/s devices have a maximum transfer rate of only about 1MB/s. Among the industry leaders are Shenzhen Netac, Founder, Destroyer, Silicon Valley, OSCOO, LG, SanDisk, Kingston, PNY, Patriot, Sony, BenQ, Newman, Digital China, Toshiba, Unicube Digital, and Siliconer.
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