Quality Flash Drives – Avoiding Scams, Ripoffs and Overpaying

The Short Answer to Quality Flash Drives and Prices

Quality Flash Drives

Quality flash drives are important. You should know about flash drives quality, so you can avoid scams, ripoffs and overpaying for low quality flash drives.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “You get what you pay for.”  This is also true for quality USB flash drives — with some nuances since flash drives might be called the “step-child of flash memory.”Here’s what we mean.

The price of flash memory is driven by supply and demand on the open market just like other commodities. The three largest  markets for NAND flash memory are smartphones (e.g., Android devices and iPhones), solid state drives (or SSDs replacing hard disk drives and fueled by data servers used for cloud computing) and tablet PCs.

Notice that USB flash drives are no longer in the top 3 due to growing demand for mobile devices. This means that priority for the highest quality flash memory chips from the major manufacturers (Toshiba, Micron, Hynix and Samsung) target the high-profit markets such as smartphones versus the low-margin USB drive market. SanDisk partners with Toshiba for manufacturing its chips and also sells its USB drives to major retailers such as Walmart and BestBuy. CustomBulkUSB’s flash drives come from the top manufacturers. We provide grade A tier quality flash drives with a one year warranty. Get a free quote now!

Flash Drives Quality and Price is Driven by Physics

The quality and pricing of flash drives is driven by the physics of the business: in order to give consumers smaller gadgets (flash drives or mobile devices with greater capacity and computing power, manufacturers must pack more electronics into smaller spaces. We have now reached a point where packing more computing power and storage into tinier spaces is resulting in current leakage, reducing flash memory reliability.  So on a given manufactured wafer some flash memory will have better performance and reliability than other parts of that same wafer. The highest quality grade will go to smartphones and other higher end markets.

Flash drives quality categorization

Highest quality flash drives are known as Grade A or Tier 1, made by the top vendors with their names on the chips inside the USBs. Consumers and businesses will pay a bit of a premium to get these highest quality flash drives which have a very, very low failure rate.  Next is Grade B or Tier 2, which are very reliable USB drives made by top producers, but could have as high as a .5% to 3% failure rate.  Many corporations and small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) choose these for promotional purposes since they are giveaways.  Quite simply many entrepreneurs and SMEs simply do not have the budget to buy Tier 1 flash drives for all of their promotional events or marketing initiatives.  Finally, is the Tier 3 /Grade C or worse along with the scams and ripoffs — these flash drives are not only unreliable (high as 10-30% failure rate, but there is the possibility that the storage capacity will be only 50% or less than stated:  a 2GB flash drive has only 1GB of capacity.

Our Recommendation as Pragmatists, Not Purists

We’ve been on the phone and talked with many business owners and professionals over the years.  We always recommend Tier 1, Grade A quality flash drives but if you simply cannot afford it accept nothing less than Tier 2, Grade B and buy 1-3% more USBs to offset the potential problem with a flash drive or two.  Here are some other tips:

• Talk to the vendor, don’t just purchase blindly online.  Get a real live person on the phone and ask questions.  If you don’t feel comfortable, don’t buy from them.  Nearly every time your gut feeling will be correct.
• For American, do business with someone in the USA that you can follow up with and not get stuck with a shipment of bad product.
• Read the terms on their website, which should allow for refunds or replacements.

Feel free to explore our site, check out testimonials and clients we have worked with. We provide Grade A quality flash drives with a fast delivery along with a one year guarantee. Get a free quote now!