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Scott Lurndal

writes:

However there is one peculiar thing, which makes no sense. The driver
for it, is *ON* the drive. So, if I actually needed the driver, how the
heck can I get to it. That's pretty stupid.

I think the computer is able to READ and WRITE the USB drive without the driver. It already knows how to talk to USB.

The driver on the USB drive probably enables "extra features" like encyption or other stuff you may not want to use anyway. But if you wanted those extra features, you would need the driver.

There are a number of factors that play into drive compatability:

0) Host to Drive communications interface (RLL, MFM, IDE/EIDE/ATA, Serial ATA (SATA),
Parallel SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), FiberChannel, iSCSI, FCoE,
and the Universal Serial Bus (USB)).

USB Mass Storage devices leveraged the SCSI command set to enable resuse
of parts of the operating system storage stack (as did the ATA packet
interface - ATAPI).

1) Low-level format (usually done at the factory) which breaks each
track on the drive into fixed length sectors (usually 512 bytes
each, with larger drives 4096 bytes is becoming common, but for
legacy systems 100-byte and 180-byte sectors have been used in the past).

2) File-system format which organizes the data on the device by providing
a table-of-contents and managing the unallocated space. Typically
a new drive will be high-level formatted with the microsoft File Allocation
Table (FAT) filesystem as pretty much any modern operating system will have
the capability of reading and writing a FAT filesystem. Other file systems
include HPFS, NTFS, S5, UFS, VxFS, XFS, EXTx, BTTRFS, et alia.

The software provided on the drive is usually backup software, encryption
software or software designed to enable non-standard features on the drive.