Promotional USB Flash Drives Articles

USB memory sticks, also known as flash drives, have been popular for some time now. Their popularity has grown due to their physical size, appearance, and ability to hold large amounts of data. I get a lot of questions about the capacity, or the amount of data these items can hold. Once you get some basic information, you too can answer these questions.

Kilobyte (KB) - is about a thousand bytes, more accurately 2 to the 10th power, or 1,024 bytes in decimal notation.

Megabyte (MB) - is 2 to the 20th power bytes, 1,024 kb, or roughly 1,048,576 bytes in decimal notation.

Gigabyte (GB) - is two to the 30th power, 1,024 mb, or roughly 1,073,741,824 bytes in decimal notation.

We can also break down this information to classifications that are most useful to the majority of people. If you have a 1GB flash drive you have the ability to store about 240 songs or 15,000 photos. The reason there is no exact number of music or image files is because the file size changes due to factors such as quality, resolution, and clarity. You will have the ability to store more data on a 1GB flash drive than on a 512MB flash drive. As was explained earlier, there are 1,024 MB in a GB, so a 512MB flash drive will generally hold one half the number of songs or photos that a 1GB flash drive will hold.

Another common question about flash drives is: Are these items fully made in the United States? In some cases there is a possibility, but for the most part the items will be manufactured overseas. For example, view the image below. I took a sample USB memory stick and cut it open. The chip that is inside, in this example, is a Samsung. While the casing may be Made in the USA, the chip is not.

Please do not open your flash drives. They will no longer function!

One very neat thing that we have the ability to do is have your company logo water marked saved in the memory of a flash drive. This means that when you insert the flash drive into the computer, a window pops up showing the data on the flash drive. The background of this window, as with most windows, is usually white. We can save your logo as this background. Your company branding will be seen each time your client or employee tries to access their files. With a logo on the outside and a logo built in, your company will get tons of exposure with imprinted USB memory sticks.