A Guide to Flash Drive Quality

For the past decade in which CFgear has been selling custom USB flash drives, we’ve been asked about the significance of speed in quality flash drives. The short answer is this: When it comes to USB devices, speed is the most significant gauge of quality. The detailed answer is discussed below.

Flash Drive Anatomy 101

While it’s unlikely that you’ll ever see a course name by this title, the concept of flash drive anatomy bears consideration. The inner workings (or “guts”) of a drive include these three important parts:

• PCB circuitry
• USB controller
• USB flash memory chip

The Real Meaning of Speed

You might be thinking that speed merely refers to how quickly a song will download or the data will be able to transfer to and from your flash drive; however, speed truly relates to the quality of your device.

Here’s a basic guideline:

• Low Grade: Less than 3 Mb per second
• Top Grade: More than 3 Mb per second

The low-grade drives have very low-quality chips and controllers, which translates into a short lifespan of cycles on the drive. Cycles refer to actions such as saving or deleting files. On a flash drive with a short lifespan of cycles, you could potentially save 10 files to the drive and then become disappointed that you can add no more files. When you go to delete those files, you cannot perform those actions, either: The drive’s life is over.

How To Avoid Getting Scammed

At one point, an industry-wide, 2-tier grading system seemed to be pretty standard: “Grade A” or “Tier 1” referred to higher quality drives, while “Grade B” or “Tier 2” referred to those of lower quality. More recently, some vendors have begun to muddy the waters by using other terms, like “premium,” to describe their drives. This changeover has made the terms virtually pointless.

If a price listed for a flash drive is lower, by far, than any other prices that you’ve seen for a similar drive, you’re probably being scammed. In order to find out exactly what you’re getting, you can request a screenshot that shows its speed. In addition to asking for proof of speed, buying from a reputable company can help increase the chances that what you’re buying does have value.

Budget-Friendly Promotional Products

Because we’re an industry leader in the sale of USB devices, we can tell you that the price difference between top-quality drives and their low-quality counterparts is not worth the “savings” that you’ll seem to receive. We’re talking cents, not dollars, here.

If you simply can’t afford the high-quality drives but want to promote your company, you can choose from many inexpensive custom-printed promotional product options from our sister company, www.cfpromo.com. For under a dollar, you can provide your customers or prospective customers with usable promotional merchandise instead of giving them a sub-par flash drive they won’t be able to use.