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Articles on USB Memory Sticks
Choosing your USB Memory Stick Supplier
There are currently many suppliers of Branded and Promotional USB Memory Sticks. This makes it a fiercely competitive market, which bodes well for the consumer as this naturally leads to lower prices. However, this also puts a lot of pressure on suppliers to reduce their costs. Some suppliers take this too far so it is important to consider factors other than price when choosing your USB Memory Stick supplier, four important considerations to take into account are:
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Speed of Service
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Quality of USB Memory Sticks
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Financial Stability of Company Supplying Flash Drives
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Reputation
Speed of service will largely depend on the company's business model. Many companies claim to have fast turnaround times, but when asked to supply large amounts of Branded USB Memory Sticks they fall short on initial promises and the turnaround times go up 2 or 3 times. Other companies who have more control over their supply chain will live up to their promises and these are naturally the companies you'll want to choose.
Quality control is crucial for products that will end up representing your company. It is important to find a supplier that understands this and won't cut corners or send you defunct goods. For instance, some USB Flash Drive suppliers cut costs by using refurbished NAND flash memory. This is generally less reliable than brand new NAND Flash. It may save you money, but do you want the product you've given to a client failing? This is not going leave your company in a good light, and once they've thrown the USB Stick away they're no longer carrying your companies name around with them.
As with any company you're going to enter into a financial relationship with it's always prudent to run a credit check to make sure it's not going to go under in the next month or so, if it does you're unlikely to get your money back. As mentioned earlier this is a very competitive industry and insolvency is not that uncommon, we've often found businesses asking us to rush through orders after their original suppliers gone bankrupt. Not only have they lost their money they're also endanger of missing their deadline.
Reputation speaks volumes, if a company has delivered similar sized orders of USB Memory Sticks in the time frame you want many times before, they can probably do it again. Here at USB Memory Sticks we have a strong reputation within the industry for supplying large orders of high quality branded memory sticks very quickly across the UK, Europe, China and Russia. Please see our testimonial page.
What are Memory Sticks used for?
Memory Sticks are carried around by people across the whole spectrum of society to help them with their data storage needs. From primary school pupils to head masters, from graduates to high flying execs. The USB Memory Stick is seen as a light way to carry around important data. Memory Sticks can now hold up to 16GB, which is a lot of data!
Memory Sticks are particularly popular amongst students. A Memory Stick is far lighter than a laptop, so the walk into college is far easier to manage with a Memory Stick. From there students can just plug the Memory Stick into a desk top and off they go. Memory Sticks aren't only used by students though, Memory Sticks are popular in business where they are regularly used by professionals to backup data, carry their C.V., personal files, mp3s, mp4s etc. Memory Sticks
Memory Sticks have so many different names, why?
The real name for what is most commonly known as a Memory Stick is a USB Flash Drive. A Memory Stick is actually a different type of memory storage device made by Sony, but that hasn't stopped it becoming the most commonly used word to describe a USB Flash Drive. USB Flash Drives and Memory Sticks have many different synonyms: Memory Key, USB Key, USB Stick, USB memory, Pen-drive, USB Pen, jump drive etc... These different names for Memory Sticks come from the first companies that started to produce them. Memory Key is a derivative of DiskonKey one of the first USB Flash Drives made by Lexar. Memory Stick is a name Sony gave to its first flash memory storage.
What is a Memory Stick made from?
A Memory Stick consists of 5 basic components: a male type-A USB connector, a USB Mass storage controller, a Nand flash memory chip, a crystal oscillator and a case. Other additional components that may or may not appear on a Memory Stick are, LEDs, write protect switches and a key ring attachment. Cases of Memory Sticks vary enormously from fruit baskets to poker chips.
USB Memory Sticks Have Been Around for a While What's Next?
For the fast moving technology industry Memory Sticks have been around for a long time, almost 10 years, but they still have no obvious successor. This is probably because USB Memory Sticks keep evolving and their capacities have increased steadily since they first hit the removable storage scene. Memory Sticks started off at 16mb, nowadays a typical USB Memory Stick will have a capacity of 1GB and the highest capacity of a Memory Stick is 16GB. Not only have flash drives increased in capacity, they have also reduced in size, flash drives are now less than a fifth of the size of their predecessors. The success of Memory Sticks can be attributed in part to the improvement in the underlying technology which has enabled these improvements. One might look at it differently and say that Memory Sticks are constantly being surpassed by higher capacity Memory Sticks. Whichever way you look at it Memory Sticks look like they will be in use for the foreseeable future. Maybe the biggest threat to the use of Memory Sticks is a world where people have no use for local memory at all, where people have constant access to the internet and can access a server at any time they wish. In a world like this people would have no use for portable memory storage as they would have constant access to the memory on their server. With mobile internet becoming cheaper than ever this prospect isn't too far away. However whether practical or not people will always have more faith in memory they hold in their hand.
USB Memory Sticks for Schools
USB Memory Sticks are a great way for primary and secondary school students to carry their ICT homework and coursework around with them. They are more robust than the floppy disk, which so often used to let students down when they could afford it least.
Memory Sticks can hold far more data than a floppy disk and unlike DVDs they don't need any expensive reading or rewriting equipment, all they need is a USB port. It is also worth noting that many of the new ultra portable laptops have completely disposed of disk based drives, for example the ASUS EEEPC uses a Solid State Drive for the hard drive and has no CD or DVD reader/writer. This means that a USB memory stick is the only option for physical data transfer using these laptops.
School memory sticks can be pre-loaded with course notes, homework exercises, links to resource websites and anything else you wish to put on the drive. The USB sticks can also be branded with your school's logo, motto or crest. It is also possible to personalise each flash drive with the individual names of each pupil, this is useful to prevent students getting their flash drives muddled up.
As well as being popular amongst students, memory sticks are a favourite among teachers who can save all their teaching resources on one memory sticks and rather than having to carry a library around with them they can simply put all the information they need on a USB stick that they can carry around in their pocket, the memory stick can carry everything a teacher needs: books, videos, music, presentations and exam papers.
Memory sticks are a great way for both teachers and students to carry their learning resources around with them whilst avoiding damaging themselves by carrying heavy books or laptops from classroom to classroom. For information on how to use a USB Memory Stick read the following PDF, How to Safely use a USB Memory Stick.
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