Flash storage is popular data storage technology developed on the basis of high-speed and electrically programmable memory. The flash storage is used widely in modern lives mainly due to its portability and great compatibility.
Two most important reasons to explain why flash drive (flash memory) is so popular are:
- You can carry your data with you conveniently with a flash drive.
- The flash drive makes data transfer between different devices quite an easy thing.
It has been long since flash drive is used as a storage medium by home users and companies. Yet, it is good news that flash drive is adopted by more and more colleges and universities to improve study. Now, I’m going to talk about flash drive in higher education.

Flash Drive in Higher Education
A variety of computing initiatives in colleges and universities are improved by technology investments gained because of advances in flash storage. Flash storage is a wonderful choice since its read speed is significantly higher than other storages. For instance, the flash drive allows you to access data in microseconds while a hard disk drive could only access in milliseconds.
Please note that you can’t get access to data if the flash drive is not recognized:
According to a new IT resource paper, the flash storage is used as a modern flash solution now in both colleges and universities to help:
- Reduce IT costs.
- Improve student services.
- Provide scalability to storage needs.
- …
In the past, you can find flash storage mainly in some small electronic devices. Yet, things become different with the appearance of the newer all-flash arrays. By combining multiple flash drives, the flash array is able to deal with heavier loads.
Currently, you can find the flash solution is adopted to assist online course. After upgrading to all-flash storage, computer refresh budget of the University of Portland in Oregon has been reduced by 20 percent. The infrastructure manager said that by providing students with virtualized workspaces, the campus has reduced the number of computer labs greatly. That is to say, the adding of flash drive in higher education has helped greatly to save spaces, which will then be reused as classrooms.
4 Ways That Flash Drive Is Used in Higher Education
- Virtual desktop infrastructure: VDI is actually a shining star in higher education. It plays an important role in improving user experience, offering specialized applications for any devices, and helping institutions scale up services.
- Data analytics: the applying of flash storage does a good favor to analytics that support administrative initiatives. At Davenport University, the all-flash storage arrays and data-streaming services (from Oracle and Microsoft SQL) are combined together by the administrators to accelerate the analytics capabilities.
- Research labs: a better infrastructure is needed since researchers rely more on Big Data and high-performance computing. At the University of California, Berkeley, an open-source library (which needs flash storage to achieve high availability) has been developing to handle with heavy loads.
- Online learning: at Mississippi Virtual Community College, it is said that all-flash arrays and VMware virtualization software are integrated in order to improve online capabilities for the growing student population.

Please don’t get into panic when a USB stick is broken.
Transform Higher Education – Pure Storage
According to the Transform Higher Education of Pure Storage, institutions are able to do a lot of things thanks to all-flash storage solutions:
- Big data management
- Virtual desktop infrastructure building
- Application performance improvement
- And so on
A new concept is introduced to the market by providers like Pure Storage with the decrease of the cost of flash technology:
Buy storage once and keep it up to date forever with software and hardware upgrades that don’t require re-buying terabytes of storage, migrating data, or disrupting the environment.
Flash Drive for Enterprise
When compared to traditional hard disk drive or solid-state disk, the flash storage can better meet the increasing demands on infrastructure. Besides, it’s a better choice when performance, capacity and scale become increasingly significant. In addition, the flash solution is better than SSD in terms of enterprise storage:
- It is much faster.
- It is more economical.
- It can be erased easily and reprogrammed electronically.
- …
User Comments :