USB Pen Drives
USB Pen Drives (also known as Thumb Drives, or Flash Drives) are capable of holding large amounts of data in a relatively small unit.
Apart from the size, the other major benefit of these Pen Drives is the "plug-and-play" capabilities. You just stick them into a USB drive, and you expand your computer's own storage capabilities considerably.
The obvious use for these drives is to carry around your music, movies and files on a stick, but there are some other uses. You can actually store Portable versions of many applications - such as office applications, music players, web browsers - and run these without installing on the host PC. Once you are finished, you unplug your USB Pen Drive - and leave no trace on the host computer. In other words, if you've been browsing the web, no "history" will be left on the computer's own browser.
An additional advantage of USB sticks over CDs or DVDs (apart from no need to burn data to them) is that they are faster, since your Drive doesn't need to speed up before it can start reading from it.
USB Pen Drives come in various memory sizes. Just a couple of years ago, 512MB was considered large (and expensive) whereas anything under 2GB today is considered relatively small.
1GB means 1 GigaByte - approximately 1,000 MBs. MB stands for MegaByte - around 1 million bytes of data.