What do you call a USB flash disk?

I assume usually you don’t say USB flash disk, right?

By the way, in Chinese we call it something more like U Disk.

Solution 1:

Conversationally, I've usually heard them called a drive (not a disc). Here in the U.S., I've heard all of these terms used:

• Flash drive
• Thumbnail drive
• USB drive

It will be interesting to hear what others say; this might be a regional thing.

By the way, I was curious: I typed "flash drive" and "U disk" into Google Images (in "quotes"), just to see what kind of results I'd get. (That's not a bad way to see if a term means what you think it means. Both searches yielded plenty of pictures of the devices in question; however, "U disk" yielded over one million results, while "flash drive" returned more than 32 million. Such a disparity might suggest that the latter is a more common term, though this is a very unscientific method, and should not be treated as incontrovertible evidence.)

Solution 2:

Not yet stated, I have always referred to them as memory sticks.

Solution 3:

I know lots of people, me included, who call them jump drives.

It is like Xerox and Aspirin. JumpDrive is/was a Lexar name for their flash drive, but even Wikipedia’s article on USB flash drives recognizes jump drive as a term.

WiseGeek says:

JumpDrive is a Lexar brand name for a Universal Serial Bus (USB) storage device, also called a USB flash drive (UFD). As is sometimes the case with brand names, the term “jumpdrive” is occasionally used by consumers when referring to any USB flash drive, in the same way “Kleenex” is often used to refer to any brand of facial tissue. Technically, the industry refers to these devices as UFDs, though consumers are mostly unfamiliar with the acronym, more often using terms like memory stick, thumb drive, or flash drive.