advantages
- Compared to hard drives, flash drives use little power, have no fragile moving parts, and for most capacities are small and light.
- Data stored on flash drives is impervious to mechanical shock, magnetic fields, scratches and dust. These properties make them suitable for transporting data from place to place and keeping the data readily at hand.
- Flash drives also store data densely compared to many removable media.
-  Flash drives implement the USB mass storage device class so that most modern operating systems can read and write to them without installing device drivers .
- Specially manufactured flash drives are available that have a tough rubber or metal casing designed to be waterproof and virtually “unbreakable”. These flash drives retain their memory after being submerged in water, and even through a machine wash.

Disadvantages
- Like all flash memory devices, flash drives can sustain only a limited number of write and erase cycles before the drive fails.
- Most USB flash drives no longer include a write-protect mechanism, although a small number have a switch on the housing of the drive itself to keep the host computer from writing or modifying data on the drive.
- A drawback to the small size is that they are easily misplaced, left behind, or otherwise lost.
- USB flash drives are more expensive per unit of storage than large hard drives, but are less expensive in capacities of a few tens of gigabytes as of 2011 Maximum available capacity is increasing with time, but is less than larger hard drives.
- Most USB based flash technology integrates a printed circuit board with a metal tip which is simply soldered on. As a result the stress point is where the two pieces join. Since many Flash Drives stick out from a users laptop or PC they are likely to be bumped repeatedly in their life time and may break at the stress point.