Memory Stick

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What Does Memory Stick Mean?

A Memory Stick is a type of portable flash memory storage appliance that’s typically used with handheld devices. Memory Sticks were first introduced by Sony in their cameras, camcorders and other digital photography equipment.

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Memory Sticks were launched by Sony in 1998. In 2010, Sony announced that it would add support for SD cards to new gadgets, suggesting that Memory Sticks would be phased out in favor of SD, which had been widely adopted by other manufacturers.

Techopedia Explains Memory Stick

A Memory Stick is similar to an SD card but is Sony’s proprietary design version of this technology. As such, memory sticks were designed provide I/O services for handheld digital photography equipment manufactured by Sony. The initial versions had a very small form factor of about 2 inches in length, with very thin breadth and girth, and a base capacity of 8 MB to 128 MB. The data in a Memory Stick is accessible through a compatible external memory card/stick reader or integrated within a computer.

A Memory Stick is often confused with USB flash/pen drive, it differs in terms of its appearance, technology and usage.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.