Flash drives are also cost-effective. You can securely store a few dozen gigabytes of data for less than $30, and these devices range in storage capacity, price and overall size - equal to the amount you're willing to invest. Some even have special features like lanyards, locks, belt clips and key fobs to make them easier to carry and keep track of.
You can get USB 3.0 speed in a compact and durable metal USB drive from Kingston for under $10. It sports a capless design with a sturdy keyring, perfect for travel or as a part of your everyday carry. The design can even be customized to add your logo or company name. Read speeds top 100 Mb/s, while write speeds are on the slow end. With a five-year warranty, a great design, and a value price, this small drive makes a perfect addition to your keyring. 

The entire case of the Kingston flash drive slides into the USB port, making it a tremendously compact and sleek option for data storage. The hole in the back allows it to be attached to a keychain, which ensures you won’t forget it at home when you need it at work. Pros: Affordable, sleek design, good option for travel. Cons: Some found that the small casing made it more delicate Image Courtesy of Amazon
“The transfer speeds are satisfyingly fast for reading and writing all kinds of files, whether large HD videos or unsorted media folders,” our tester reported of this flash drive. He also liked the inclusion of the SecureAccess file encryption, although advanced features are an additional purchase. In terms of negatives, our reviewer called the plastic shell casing “flimsy and fragile” and observed that the transfer speeds are capped when the flash drive is plugged into a USB hub. Overall? Our tester was “more than satisfied with the transfer speeds, but would have appreciated a better, sturdier physical design.”

Installers of some operating systems can be stored to a flash drive instead of a CD or DVD, including various Linux distributions, Windows 7 and newer versions, and macOS. In particular, Mac OS X 10.7 is distributed only online, through the Mac App Store, or on flash drives; for a MacBook Air with Boot Camp and no external optical drive, a flash drive can be used to run installation of Windows or Linux.
You can get USB 3.0 speed in a compact and durable metal USB drive from Kingston for under $10. It sports a capless design with a sturdy keyring, perfect for travel or as a part of your everyday carry. The design can even be customized to add your logo or company name. Read speeds top 100 Mb/s, while write speeds are on the slow end. With a five-year warranty, a great design, and a value price, this small drive makes a perfect addition to your keyring. 

Third generation USB flash drives were announced in late 2008 and became available in 2010.[citation needed] Like USB 2.0 before it, USB 3.0 dramatically improved data transfer rates compared to its predecessor. The USB 3.0 interface specified transfer rates up to 5 Gbit/s (625 MB/s), compared to USB 2.0's 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s).[citation needed] By 2010 the maximum available storage capacity for the devices had reached upwards of 128 GB.[7] USB 3.0 was slow to appear in laptops. As of 2010, the majority of laptop models still contained the 2.0.[23]
To see if ShippingPass is right for you, try a 30-day free trial. Also, with ShippingPass, there is no need to worry about commitment. If you decide you want to discontinue the service, you can cancel your subscription at any time. No matter what your shipping needs, Walmart's got you covered. Sign up for ShippingPass so you can shop more, save money and live better.
We are specialists, when it comes to producing a custom flash drives to your specifications. Personalized USB drives are great for promotion of your favorite team, non for profit organization, or business. Important marketing information can be loaded on flash drives. You can imprint USB drives with logos for your school, or use it as a gift to employees, or guests at the wedding.
With wide deployment(s) of flash drives being used in various environments (secured or otherwise), the issue of data and information security remains important. The use of biometrics and encryption is becoming the norm with the need for increased security for data; on-the-fly encryption systems are particularly useful in this regard, as they can transparently encrypt large amounts of data. In some cases a secure USB drive may use a hardware-based encryption mechanism that uses a hardware module instead of software for strongly encrypting data. IEEE 1667 is an attempt to create a generic authentication platform for USB drives. It is supported in Windows 7 and Windows Vista (Service Pack 2 with a hotfix).[47]
The SanDisk PRO gives you blistering speeds, offering 420 MB/s on the reading front and 380 MB/s on the writing end, which is 3–4x faster than what a standard USB 3.0 drive will offer. The sleek, aluminum casing is both super durable and very eye-catching, so you can bring it with you to your business meetings and look professional as well. The onboard AES, 128-bit file encryption gives you top-of-the-line security for your sensitive files. That USB 3.0 connection is also backward compatible with USB 2.0, so you won’t hit any snags with an older computer. SanDisk is so confident in the functionality of this little drive, that they’ve even backed it with a full lifetime warranty in case any issues befall it. Finally, there’s a file backup system you can download called RescuePRO that will let you recover lost files if needed.
^ Also known as a thumb drive, pen drive, gig stick, flash stick, jump drive, disk key, disk on key (after the original M-Systems DiskOnKey drive from 2000),[1] flash-drive, memory stick (not to be confused with the Sony Memory Stick), USB key, USB stick or USB memory. For an incomplete list of alternative names, see the list of redirects to this article.
External flash drives use what's known as "solid-state" storage, which can store, back up, and retrieve data using only electronic circuits. Solid-state drives do not contain any moving mechanical parts, which enables them to access data quickly and easy. A typical flash drive allows up to 100,000 write/erase cycles before the integrity of the data starts to degrade. This translates to around a 10-year lifespan, depending on how much it is used.
Floppy disk drives are rarely fitted to modern computers and are obsolete for normal purposes, although internal and external drives can be fitted if required. Floppy disks may be the method of choice for transferring data to and from very old computers without USB or booting from floppy disks, and so they are sometimes used to change the firmware on, for example, BIOS chips. Devices with removable storage like older Yamaha music keyboards are also dependent on floppy disks, which require computers to process them. Newer devices are built with USB flash drive support.
On the more practical side our flash drives, also called thumbdrives or memory sticks are available in memory capacities from 64MB to 256GB. With memory capacities like that, we certainly have the options to cover whatever your data storage requirements may be. For more information on data storage capacities, check out our USB Flash Drive Capacity Guide.

Usually, such drives will be custom-stamped with a company's logo, as a form of advertising. The drive may be blank, or preloaded with graphics, documentation, web links, Flash animation or other multimedia, and free or demonstration software. Some preloaded drives are read-only, while others are configured with both read-only and user-writable segments. Such dual-partition drives are more expensive.[61]
This USB 3.0 drive offers what the company is calling business-grade security with 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption. You can also choose a stepped up “managed” version that offers a more complete set of management tools using SafeConsole as support. Finally, there’s an anti-virus version that loads in ESET antivirus software out of the box to avoid trojan horses and other hacker tracking programs. All of the models are TAA-compliant, so this drive won’t be in breach of government regulations, and that USB 3.0 means that you’ll have nearly the fastest transfer speeds possible. You can pick it up in sizes ranging from 4GB to 64GB.
Some value-added resellers are now using a flash drive as part of small-business turnkey solutions (e.g., point-of-sale systems). The drive is used as a backup medium: at the close of business each night, the drive is inserted, and a database backup is saved to the drive. Alternatively, the drive can be left inserted through the business day, and data regularly updated. In either case, the drive is removed at night and taken offsite.

Some manufacturers, aiming at a "best of both worlds" solution, have produced card readers that approach the size and form of USB flash drives (e.g., Kingston MobileLite,[65] SanDisk MobileMate[66]) These readers are limited to a specific subset of memory card formats (such as SD, microSD, or Memory Stick), and often completely enclose the card, offering durability and portability approaching, if not quite equal to, that of a flash drive. Although the combined cost of a mini-reader and a memory card is usually slightly higher than a USB flash drive of comparable capacity, the reader + card solution offers additional flexibility of use, and virtually "unlimited" capacity. The ubiquity of SD cards is such that, circa 2011, due to economies of scale, their price is now less than an equivalent-capacity USB flash drive, even with the added cost of a USB SD card reader.
Flash drives are also cost-effective. You can securely store a few dozen gigabytes of data for less than $30, and these devices range in storage capacity, price and overall size - equal to the amount you're willing to invest. Some even have special features like lanyards, locks, belt clips and key fobs to make them easier to carry and keep track of.
×