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Environmentally friendly USB flash drives for your next promotion

Nature and ecology are not necessarily the two first things that come to mind when you need to purchase an inexpensive promotional USB item. It is equally true that the environmentally friendly options are usually are not the cheapest. However, when one needs to make a certain statement about personal or company values, the best choice is to lead by example.

These simple, but very functional paper USB flash drives are color and hot-stamp printable. They are made from recycled paper, very sturdy, and of high quality. Obviously, the drive also contains metal parts and limited amount of plastic parts. Check it out for yourself.

The rectangular drive has the least amount of plastic as it does not require reinforcement ring at the top of the drive. However, the round drive is sturdier and will last longer in the customer’s hands.

Choosing rectangular or round model is a matter of preference and usability. Going with an environmentally friendly drive makes a statement which any customer can appreciate.

 

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Future of the promotional USB flash drives – Think Fully Custom; Think Silicone

There are many material options when it comes to promoting and marketing with a flash drive. The enormous promotional industry created flash drive cases out of wood, metal, plastic, PVC, and silicone materials. The options are almost limitless. However, PVC and silicone materials offer the ability to remove all limits.

Creating your own shape has been out of reach for most companies. The cost for making a single mold was in the thousands! The procedure of creating a positive and then a metal alloy negative or precision machining the mold can be costly.

The globalization of the economy and massive production shift to China as well as other low-labor cost countries has created a unique opportunity for any company to use custom shapes almost as easily as creating a new logo for your business cards.

Relatively simple shapes with up to 2 colors can be obtained for a mold fee of $250. If your shape is complex with a delicate design, expect to pay up to $700. One way or another, the cost for ordering 1000 custom flash drives for your marketing or promotional campaign will increase by a meager $0.25 to $0.70 per drive. Putting it in a more practical perspective, a flash drive with a shape of your logo, mascot, flag, car, boat, produce,  or anything else you can image in a highly usable 4GB capacity will run you around $8 per piece. Want it even less; get highly used promotional capacity of 1GB for $6 per piece.

Check out our store for some great ideas. Keep in mind that you are not limited by the designs on our webpage. Your custom design can be implemented just as easily and still for a low cost!

It is time to shift to a higher gear to custom PVC or silicone USB flash drives. Your own design, colors, and printed logo will surely leave your competitors in the dust.

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SSD – better performance; How about the reliability?

There has been many articles praising and reviewing high performance of SSDs compared to the old mechanical workhorses of the computer world – the hard disk drive. It has been generally assumed that the SSDs offer not only the performance benefit but also the reliability due to the lack of moving parts.

Since SSDs are very new to the computer industry compared to HDDs, there are only a handful of reliability studies showing the practical nature of the solid state drives. As more large data warehouses and other large operators start to adopt the faster SSDs, a preliminary reliability picture starts to emerge; and it is quite surprising.

Usually when one reads or hears about the SSDs, its reliability is supported by a simple fact- the lack of moving parts. However, not many talk about the ever decreasing production size of the NAND flash memory to 25nm raising the risk of data stability or firmware and IC failures raising the risk of the total drive failure.

The SSD technology is new and there are many challenges facing the newcomer. The biggest challenge is the price – the industry is trying to rush to reduce the cost of the SSDs to help with the market adoption. With the rush come mistakes and issues with the reliability. Early adopters who are looking for best performance help the rest of us by purchasing and experimenting with the drives. For those who are looking at SSDs for reliability, it is best to wait until the experimentation is complete.

Early studies into the SSD reliability show comparable results to HDDs. However, it may be too early to tell how the SSDs fare due to the lack of sufficient solid state drives in the market for comparison to the HDDs. It is certain that if reliability is your top concern, the new technology of SSD may be too new and too rushed to get into.