Our Blog and USB Flash Drive News.

Greetings from BestFlashDrives.com,  your leading provider of custom usb flash drives! 

We sell a lot of usb flash drives to the promotional market around here, and people often ask how much stuff can fit on a USB drive and what size to buy.  So here's a little bit of info that we hope will be helpful.

 Today the most popular memory size for giveaways and premiums  is 2GB, followed closely by 1GB.  So, here are some approximations of how much will fit on a drive:

Greetings from BestFlashDrives.com, leading provider of custom USB flash drives!

Good news for those who have the need for speed when transferring data to USB drives or other devices - Microsoft just announced that it will be making USB 3.0 compatibility a standard part of it's new  Windows 8 operating system.   This means you won't have to download a driver to use 3.0 USB drives or devices anymore, not that this was such a big deal, but it will make everything that much easier now.

Microsoft announced that by 2015 all new PCs will come standard with USB 3.0 ports, enabling use of SuperSpeed USBs.  

Greetings from BestFlashDrives.com, your leading supplier of custom printed and custom made USB drives!

Just a quick note regarding a trend we've been seeing and that is more and more very cheap drives flooding the market.   If you get a quote from a company selling USB's and it looks almost too good to be true, it probably is.  

These flash drives that are sold for oh-so-cheap are usually one of two things. They're either grade c memory chips that come from the part of the wafer that doesn't pass quality control standards at the major chip factories, and are sold for cheap and have very high failure rates.  Or, they're what's called "upgrade chips".  These chips have been altered so that they look like they have 1GB or close of memory when you plug them into your computer but they actually may have only about 75% of that.  Yes, it's pretty sneaky. Or, they could be selling you USB drives that are both - grade c rejects and also don't have full memory capacity.  

Greetings from BestFlashDrives.com, your source for custom made USB flash drives for the promotional market. 

In an effort to keep our customer updated on the latest effects on USB flash drive supply due to the disaster in Japan,we recommend reading this New York Times article which explains how key silicone wafer and flash memory makers in Japan have been effected by the earthquake and tsunami.

We're seeing a stabilization in prices this week, so hopefully that trend will continue and we'll keep you posted.

Greetings from BestFlashDrives.com.   We all watched in sadness as Japan was struck with terrible devastation from both earthquake and tsunamis a few days ago.  The impact of this natural disaster has been felt worldwide and extends to our business here at BestFlashDrives.

Japan manufactures significant amounts of the silicon wafers and circuit boards used to make USB flash drives. With a couple of key plants reportedly unable to manufacture in Japan, China is reporting a sharp increase in flash memory prices overnight, and shortages.  

We are working to determine the exact story and how to minimize the impact to you.  We're committed to communicating information as soon as it becomes available.  

Greetings from BestFlashDrives.com!   There was a great article yesterday in the New York Times on Google's new open source operating system (OS), Google Chrome. 

It appears that it's ready well before Google thought it would be, and not only works on netbooks as originally planned, but also will boot up any PC, direct from a USB flash drive (that's the part we like!). 

Google was planning the release after a lot more testing and then only for the netbook at first, but the open source crowd has been far more entheusiastic than anticipated, and so the programming went quickly.  As with all open source projects, once the genie is out of the bottle, there's no putting it back.  So it appears that Google is rolling with it, and people seem to like it.

Greetings from BestFlashDrives.com!  We found this very helpful article on how to make a USB drive a Windows 7 bootable drive, and how to set it up to install Windows 7 on a netbook from the USB drive. 

Here's the article on How-To Geek, enjoy!

During the next few weeks there will be much photo and video taking of special family moments. 

So, before the holidays are upon us, we thought it was an appropriate time to post this brief reminder - DON'T FORGET TO BACK-UP YOUR HARD DRIVE! With one disk failure, precious family memories can be lost forever. 

I know, I'm just like you, it's something that I know is important to do, and it's always in the back of my mind - but it takes just enough time to be inconvenient, and so I put it off "until the next time I'm at my desk.." 

Greetings from BestFlashDrives.com!  I just found this great article in TechRepublic about cool uses for USB flash drives, many that you may not have thought of but could make your digital life much easier.

Here's the list, but be sure to check out the article for the details:

1. Run portable apps

Greetings from BestFlashDrives.com.  This post if for anyone who has ever struggled with keeping organized between their work computer and their home computer, or their desktop pc and laptop pc, or between any 2 or more computers! If you're like me, you know how aggrevating this can be.

 Well thanks to a great little program called Carry It Easy Plus, I have almost, almost, got this problem solved. 

This program belongs to a category of software called synchronization software.  It runs on a USB flash drive, copying and compressing whatever files on your computer that you select.  Then when you unplug the USB drive from one computer and plug it into another, it will copy down all of the files from your other computer.  And the beauty of it is, every time you make a change in a file on one computer, after you run the sync program with the other computer via the USB drive, presto, you're up-to-date!   You can keep all of your office files synced on both machines (or multiple machines for that matter), your bookmarks in your browser, and even your email (if you're lucky..I'll get to that in a minute).