In a very short period of time USB memory sticks and flash drives have virtually replaced CDs as the preferred backup device. The advantages are too hard to ignore – more storage space, smaller size and they’re virtually indestructible.

Memory is key

When we talk about the memory, we’re not talking about the size of the drive. That’s a personal choice and you can get drives up to 64 gigs these days. Instead, we’re talking about the quality of the flash memory chips that make this drive possible.

These chips are graded by the industry. Grade A is the best and they go down from there in grading. The key is to purchase Grade A whenever possible, or at the very least, the highest grade your budget can afford. You’ll probably have to ask the vendor for this information. It’s usually not posted on a website or in a catalogue. Just know that lower grade chips may have issues, including higher failure rates, the inability to access or use all the memory and sluggish read/write speeds.

Which USB?

USB 1.x and USB 2.0 are the workhorses of the flash drive business. If you need to choose between these, always go with USB 2.0, as it is backwards compatible. USB 3.0 will be the new standard, but you’ll pay a premium for them right now and a lot of computers can’t take advantage of their capabilities anyway, except the newest ones on the market. Avoid USB 1.x drives. They are painfully slow, even if they are a great deal.

Is it RoHS compliant?

If you’re in the EU, you need to know this one. RoHS is shorthand for Restriction of Hazardous Substances. The regulations are designed to protect EU citizens from hazardous chemicals and substances. If your vendor is using components that aren’t RoHS compliant, you can be held responsible for this as well as the vendor. So ask if the flash drive components are RoHS compliant and if you need them, ask for copies of the RoHS certificates.

WEEE, it’s recyclable!

At least it should be. WEEE is a directive that encourages products to be 65% recycled. If your organization falls under the WEEE directive, you want to make sure the drives you order comply with it, otherwise you may get into trouble.

When shopping for a reputable supplier to handle your USB flash drive or memory stick order, or any other promotional item for that matter, be sure you pick one that has experience in the product lines you’re interested in. If you’re in the EU, find a trusted supplier that understands the requirements outlined in RoHS and WEEE and don’t be afraid to ask a lot of questions, especially if they aren’t immediately forthcoming with answers. That should be an immediate warning sign that it’s time to move onto someone else.

USB flash drives (sticks) are quite simply the most versatile and memorable item in the promotional gifts marketplace today. They allow you to pre-load information, giving the user quick and easy access to your latest catalogue or marketing campaign. I’d like to see a pen or mug do that…

But, what should you be looking for when buying promotional USB flash drive.

1. Quality
Make sure you choose a supplier who specialise in sticks and not a company offering everything. You’re looking to raise your profile, which will not be achieved by branding sub quality goods with your logo.

2. Marketing Message
A branded stick with your brochure or catalogue pre-loaded is a great way of getting your message across. In most cases we discourage the use of auto-run. It does not work on Mac’s and many administrators have blocked it.

3. Sales Vehicle
Using a stick as an incentive is a great way to get clients to buy a premium product. Alternatively it can be used as a bargaining tool for your sales staff. People love free gifts.

4. Speed
A good quality stick will have a minimum of 3MB/s writing speed and 15MB/s reading speed. Based on this a low quality 1GB stick would require approximately four minutes to fill up. A good quality one would take just under two minutes.

5. Packaging
A stylish gift box branded with your logo adds value to the stick. If you don’t have any specific packaging requirements we recommend using trays, which is more environmentally friendly.

6. Model
A professional supplier will be able to suggest a model to suit your requirements. Customising the shape or colour of the stick is a good way of making sure that you stand out from the crowd. A premium model may cost a little extra but will pay ultimately pay dividends.

7. Accessories
Adding a keyring or lanyard to the stick will allow the user to safely attach it to their person. Incorporating password protection is smart practice if sensitive information has been pre-loaded.

8. Branding
There are four types of branding which are commonly used, here are their pros and cons:
Silk Screen
Pros: cheap, quick lead times
Cons: can easily wear off on a keychain
Resin Dome
Pros: photographic quality, long lasting, short lead times
Cons: a bit more pricey
Engraving
Pros: long lasting, subtle and stylish 
Cons: no colours
Tampo
Pros: can print on rounded surfaces
Cons: high volume required

9. Express Service
If you are regularly buying sticks it might be useful to consider a supplier who retains stock in the UK. They should offer an express service and delivery can be as fast as 24 hours nationwide.

10. Price
When you purchase sticks you’ll want to get value for money but a very cheap price often means poor quality. If you have any lingering doubts insist on seeing a sample. Memory prices can vary on a daily basis so make sure you get an updated quote before you place your order.

A note on quality:
A good quality stick should work perfectly for approximately 10,000 write/erase cycles, which is the equivalent of filling and emptying the stick once a day for 25 years. Fake or white chips as they are often referred to can start to suffer from the very first cycle and are more prone to error messages and very slow data transfer speeds.

Why we’re not always the cheapest

Clients have come to us in the past with quotes from other companies, asking us if we really are the best choice, why it is we’re not always the cheapest?

There are factories out there that cut corners in order to bring down the unit cost. The following is a list of how manufacturers can dramatically reduce the cost of USB flash drives:

• Hack the memory chip so it appears larger than it is. (256mb hacked to appear like 512MB)

• Buy recycled memory and sell as “new”

• Use faulty PCBs or badly designed Controller chips.

• Low Quality Plastic Casing

• Cheap Finish

• Use paint without hardeners so the Logo print easily rubs off

These are commonly know as “White chips” and tend to be unreliable, more prone to data loss, and often suffer from quite bad degradation over time.

A well designed USB chip should work perfectly for approximately 10,000 write/erase cycles, which is the equivalent of filling and emptying the stick once a day for 27 years. “White chips” however, may start to suffer right from the first cycle. Other problems that are far more likely with these sorts of practices include operating systems failing to recognise the memory at all, error messages and very slow data transfer speeds.

There are also factories out there that use perfectly good chips, but just of a lower quality. These goods should last roughly the same amount of time as our chips (10,000 cycles), but tend to have slower read/write speeds and be slightly more prone to errors. There’s nothing wrong with these sticks, in the same way there’s nothing wrong with Tesco Value coffee. However, you wouldn’t serve it to an important customer, would you?

Now at the USB Company, we realised that you can only be the best at one thing. We decided that rather than join the multitude of companies who try to compete at price, trying their best to cut another corner to get those extra few pennies off of the manufacturing cost of each stick, we’d rather compete on quality.

We decided that while Mercedes Benz aren’t the cheapest car manufacturer, they are considered among the best, and while Ryan Air can often out price their competitors by quite a margin, we’d all rather not fly with them if we can afford anything else.

In order to do this, we have teamed up with factories in the Far East, where quality, rather than cost, is the number one priority. We are very careful as to who we buy parts from, be it controller chips or hardeners for the paint, and have set up relationships with our suppliers over several years

We also have an extensive quality assurance system, testing items both at the point of manufacture and here in the UK.

So, some companies may be a little cheaper than us. However, our products are likely to be a bit better than theirs, with a better finish, better materials used, and better technology inside.

However, we would recommend avoiding them like the plague! Remember, if they are charging you less, they are also buying for less, and buying for less usually means cutting corners, not margins.

“The bitterness of poor quality is remembered long after the sweetness of low price has faded from memory.” – Aldo Gucci,

Storage
As anyone knows in the computer industry, storage is everything. Sure, you can spring for a 1 gig drive for under $10 these days, but is that really enough space long term? The idea is to have a single flash drive that stores everything you need, not a dozen drives with a bit on each. Photos, music, video and even Word files can really suck a drive’s space dry pretty quickly. So buy as much as you can afford the first time.

Speed
Don’t bother with a USB drive that isn’t USB 2.0 compliant. The data exchange rate will frustrate you to no end. If you still have a computer that has first generation USB ports, 2.0 will still work fine. Another factor is the read/write speed of the data. Mysterious terms like “200 times faster” don’t mean anything. If speed is important to you, look for the speed in terms that are standards, such as megabytes per second (MB/sec).

Connection
There are endless options for this. You can get a Lanyard USB flash or one that fits on your key ring – the list is endless. Whatever you choose, be sure that the cap has a good fit, since you don’t want to lose your data while you’re out and about. Nothing’s worse than returning to the dorm, office or home, only to find that your drive got lost in transit, along with all your critical documents, passwords, etc. Invest in a quality piece that keeps the USB flash drive, safe and secure and the port dry and dust free and you’ll never be sorry.

As a customer you would never want to be fooled of your money, what’s more why should your precious data be at risk? Buying a flash drive that is a fake could cost you your money and your information security as well.

We at USB Company would like to make you aware of the Franken Flash Project. This project works towards ensuring that you as a customer are protected against fake sellers and their harmful products. Please visit www.sosfakeflash.wordpress.com for further useful information on how you can stay away from counterfeits.

We firmly believe you data security is all important and while there are people out there who are waiting to cheat you of your money and would not care a penny about letting you buy recycled flash drives or flash drives made of poor quality material which are cheaper but not as secure and prone to memory corruption/loss.

We at USB Company ensure you get the best quality flash drives made of genuine memory chips with the flash chip manufacturer’s name and serial number printed on it. These flash drives may work out to be costlier but you can rest assured that quality is a priority. Neither do we use recycled flash drives that are cheaper and may have manufacturer names falsely printed into them.

So, you have your nice new shiny USB Stick. The print looks good, it’s well built, and you’re ready to go. Then the phone rings. That new USB stick you’ve got, could you put a few files on it and bring it round later?
This is often where true quality shines through.

We recently obtained branded USB sticks from some of our better rivals and performed speed tests on them. We also threw in a major high street USB Brand, just to see how we compared to the premium consumer sticks.

The worst of our rivals came in at 1 Megabyte writing, with just under 8 Megabytes reading speed. This was followed closely by our other rival, who clocked in at 1.18Megabytes writing. Their reading speed, however, came back at a shocking 4.81Megabytes per second. Now this may or may not mean much to you, so lets put it into context. Both of them would require approximately fifteen minutes to fill up a 1GB memory stick. The slower reading stick would then take almost four minutes just to read that data back off of the stick, with the better of the two coming in at just under two minutes.

Next up was the high street brand. This performed far better, 3.8Megabytes writing speed and 9.9Megabytes reading speed. Just over four minutes here to write a full gigabyte to the stick, and again just under 2 minutes to read the data back.
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Now for our results. We picked a random stick out of our local stock, and found writing speeds of 4.1Megabytes per second, and a reading speed of 15.8Megabytes per second. Our one gigabyte stick would be writing at the same speed that some of our rivals are reading. Four minutes would leave you with a full memory stick. It would then take approximately one minute to read it back off of the stick.

So, why is this the case?

In other blog posts I’ve talked about the difference between good and bad suppliers. There are companies out there using dodgy controller chips, hacked memory and recycled chips. While we can’t verify for certain that the rivals we tested don’t take part in these practices, this probably wasn’t the case in this situation. It was a simple case of “acceptable” quality against high quality.

Flash memory is available, from the major suppliers (such as Sony) in both “A” and “B” grade. The B grade memory is perfectly good memory that failed to meet certain standards with regards to speed, reliability and performance. However, it was deemed “acceptable” for certain uses, therefore didn’t end up in the bin with really bad chips. This B grade memory is then put into promotional USB drives in order to cut costs. After all, they are being given away free, right? I’m sure your customers won’t blame you if they end up slow, unresponsive and ultimately unreliable in comparison? Will they? I mean, they were free, after all?

At USB Company, we’d rather not take that risk. We believe in only using the highest quality memory, paired with the highest quality controller chips, put together in the highest quality factories, complete with the highest quality finish. The result of that is plain to see.= Faster chips, far lower failure rates, and lots of very satisfied customers.

So ask yourself. Would you be happy if it took you almost 20 minutes to write some data onto your USB Stick then copy it onto another computer?

If your friend was doing the same thing in five minutes, I bet you wouldn’t be.

At the same time, around 40% of our waste burdon tends to be paper. 40% of what we throw away. What does that suggest happens to all these flyers, catalogues and other materials? . Why not try offering customers a catalogue on a USB stick? Or your students their course materials on usb rather than in thick folders that will end up at the top/bottom (delete as appropriate) of their wardrobe? Why not file internal reports on USBs rather than in giant stacks of paper that’ll end up in the shredder tomorrow, and the bin the day after? .

And why not go one step further, and look into buying some of our eco-usbs for the job? Made from bamboo, probably THE most renewable sources of wood on the planet, they are both renewable and environmentally friendly in production, and save the planet one tree at a time by keeping all your documents in an electronic form. . What do you have to lose? Other than Earth, of course. .

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Our Promotional USB sticks can be preloaded with your choice of content i.e. Software program, catalogues, power point presentation, flash presentation and pop-up websites.

1. Standard Preload- We copy your content to your promotional USB drives and users can access it at their will and can also delete the files if they don’t want them.

Pros: Non Intrusive, Higher retention value thus more exposure of your logo.

Cons: Data can easily be deleted by user.

2. Non-Erasable content

To ensure the effectiveness of your campaign we can protect your preloaded content from being deleted. The computer will recognise the locked data as a CD ROM which the user can not delete or amend in any way. The erasable part of the usb stick will appear as normal and can be used to transfer and store files as a normal usb memory stick.

Pros: Continuous exposure and data retention.

Cons: Users can not delete data to free up space on the Branded USB

3. Non-Erasable Autorun

As soon as the USB stick is inserted it will launch a presentation. This could be a website pop up or flash presentation or any other file that can be autorun in Windows. This is our most direct option and will suit a new product launch or other events where the user have less knowledge about your product or service.

Pros: Maximum exposure

Cons: Less retention value, Intrusive.

Recommendation:

Generally we would recommend to preload your USB Stick with the standard preload or the Non Erasable Option. Assuming your target audience already know your brand and have an interest in your product or service.

Important Notice:

Non Erasable and Auto run Preload will only work seamlessly with Windows based computers(Windows 98 and Newer)

Standard Prelaod will work across all platforms and is recommended if your target audience use other platforms than Windows.

There are two types of NAND Flash memory architectures: MLC(Multi Level Cell) and SLC(Single Level Cell).

In a nutshell, MLC are used in those devices requiring high performance at an attractive cost such as USB sticks and voice recorders.

SLC are used in the higher performing technology that is used to enable streaming video and Internet capability in handheld electronics such as 3G cell phones, PDAs, digital still / video cameras and MP3 players etc.

All our branded USB drives use MLC memory from Hynix, Samsung or Micron unless otherwise specified. MLC NAND Flash is rated to last approximately 10,000 cycles, which is considered more than sufficient for the average consumer application.

For example, a USB drive application that used the 10,000 write/erase cycles would enable the user to completely write and erase the entire contents once per day for 27 years, well beyond the life of the hardware.

We would also like to warn people about companies offering VERY cheap flash drives. Although many of the products appear same, the inside might be VERY different.

We spend a significant amount of resources in quality control and service. Therefore, our product prices are never the lowest in the industry. We want to give you some facts so that you can better protect your rights and investments.

In general there are four methods to dramatically lower the production cost of the USB flash disks. Unfortunately whichever method or combinations are used, product quality is sacrificed. These methods are usually some of the following:

• Use faulty or recycled flash memory chips, which might cause read and write errors
• Change flash memory chip volume information so that the lower capacity chips appear to be higher capacity (e.g. from 256MB to 512MB)
• Use faulty designed PCBs, which might cause severe electromagnetic interference
• Use faulty designed controller chips, which might cause compatibility problems when using flash disks under different operating systems

Whenever these methods are applied, you can expect problems such as users being unable to save onto the flash disk, or read and copy from the flash disk. It often occurs that operating systems can’t recognise the flash disk, I/O error messages occur, and storage capacity diminishes as the time passes.

By choosing USB Company, you can rest assured none of these will occur.