Don’t Buy Cheap USB Flash Drives

Cheap USB Flash Drives - Not Worth Buying

If you've been asked to get some printed USB flash drives of some custom USB memory sticks for your company or school then be warned - you can't just go out and get a few quotes and decide based on the cheapest price! No, that'd be way too easy and would put you in real danager of damaging your company brand or school repuation.
Why not? Well the problem is that whilst USB flash drives might look the same on the outside it's whats inside that really matters when it comes to determining the price. The outside shell of a promotional USB flash drive (the bit that's printed and carries your logo) is pretty cheap and easy to produce. Even printing multiple colours is not that costly providing the printing is done in China when the flash drives are assembled. So the outside shell with the printing on is a smallhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif percentage of the overall price you'll pay.
The majority of the cost of your promotional USB flash drives will be for the components inside the flash drive. The important bits are the USB flash chip (this is the bit of the flash drive that all of the data is stored on), the controller chip (this is the bit that manages the inputs and outputs to the flash chip - think of it as the "brains" of the flash drive and then finally there is the capacitor that control the power to the flash chip. Taken together these are the things that make the flash drive work and determine how much storage the flash drive has and how quickly you can read/write (data) to the flash drive.
The problem is that there are lots of different grades of these components available. Frankly some are rubbish and if your flash drives are made using them then expect lots to fail straight away or pretty soon after you've taken delivery of them. Even if they work the might have been "doctored" so you think you are getting a 1GB USB stick but actually the flash inside is a rejected 1GB which can only store up to say 600MB - these Grade B or rejected chips are commonly used by some suppliers of promotional USB flash drives.

Of course from the outside a cheap USB flash drive (made from cheap, Grade B or recycled components) will look just like a good quality flash drive thats been assembled from new Grade A parts - so, how do you tell what your supplier is quoting for and bear in mind that most will just trot our the line that they "only ever sell Grade A" products.
Our advice is to avoid really cheap quotes and to only buy from reputable suppliers that have been around for a good number of years and can point to a diverse range of happy clients. Get it in writing exactly what they are going to supply - not just the memory size but what grade of memory and what the minimum read/write speeds will be. Finally get a written warranty but be ware these are only useful if they are from a local supplier and the supplier looks as though they are going to be around for a while - lots of so called "suppliers" seem to operate out of spare bedrooms - check on Google Earth - always interesting to see where the so called offices of some of these companies are!!
As ever cheap is not always good value and when its your brand or name on the product its best avoided