Righto, I guess was still wondering aloud what its purpose is. Does it serve as a prefetch or some shit or is it just something tossed in for shits and giggles? I assume the latter from your response. Anyway it just strikes me as kind of odd.
It's just external storage: the easiest way to transport files externally. These just replaced DVD-RWs (which replace CD-RWs which replaced "floppy" diskettes which replaced the first, actual, physically floppy disks). Well, technically, Blu-Ray (re)writeable disks supplanted DVD-ROMs, but they were too expensive, so they never took off.
They're no difference than external storage drives which are actually a lot less cumbersome ever since USB 3.0 became the standard which started supplying enough power so that if you purchase the correct external drive you don't need a separate power brick (and its cord) to supply power to the drive. But while external storage drives may have a lot more storage, and have gotten a lot smaller in recent years, they still aren't nearly as small as "thumb" drives. Some of thumb drives even come with a little keychain attachment so you can loop them onto your keychain. That's how small they are. They're tiny.
It's just about size and convenience. Remember the standard single-lay DVD-ROMs only stored 4GB. Compare that to 128GB in that Amazon drive, or 32GB in the one that came with your wife's laptop.
They can also be very handy if you ever need to advanced troubleshooting. Because you can instruct your computer to boot from the USB flash drive instead of their interior drives. This can be used to do a major repair if Windows get busted. Alternatively, you can do a clean installation of Windows itself. You get the ISO of Windows, directly from
Microsoft, use a freeware program called
Rufus to format and install that ISO to the thumb drive, then you tell the computer in the motherboard BIOS to boot from the thumb drive. This is how most PC builders install an operating system to a brand new build. You simply enter the Windows license after you've installed it.
Or...you can run a completely different operating system off that bootable external flash drive without having to set up a true dual boot system internally. So you have a Windows PC, but you want to run Linux? You just install whichever flavor of Linux you desire to the thumb drive. Then tell the computer to prioritize the thumb drive in the boot order. When you start it, it will boot into Linux. Change the boot order priority back to the internal drive when you want to run Windows again.
