Flash Drive

The flash drive exposes flash memory to a computer as a plain block device. Where the disk drive provides access to floppies, this one provides access to flash memory. In particular, this enables use of custom firmware.

Flash memory can be inserted and removed at runtime. The drive itself cannot: computers have to be shut down before installing or removing it.

On a Linux system, the drive appears as a /dev/vdX device, following any installed hard drives, just like a floppy disk drive. It is a raw block device.

To write your firmware to the flash memory, erasing what was there before: