FlashDealer.com – Preload Your Company Data

There was a time in the late 1990s when companies would have expensive advertising agencies create and distribute mini CD-Roms that contained elaborate business presentations built in multimedia platforms such as Macromedia Director. In today’s market the WOW factor is still in effect but the technology has changed. The utility and portability of custom usb flash drives has replaced small CD-R discs in wowing customers and industry affiliates with new product information. FlashDealer.com offers custom USB drives with the option of having company information preloaded onto the flash drive.

FlashDealer.com – Thumb Drives In Any Color You Want

Pick a color any color. Or why not pick a material any material. FlashDealer.com offers custom flash drives in any color and any material you can think of. Does a personalized flash drive encapsulated in wood sound organically appealing? Or how about a custom flash drive encapsulated in leather with your company logo laser etched into the leather? Or perhaps the modern appeal of metal and aluminum is more your style? FlashDealer.com delivers memorable flash drives that will ingratiate both consumers and affiliates within your organization.

Solid State 640GB PCI Express Flash Drive Costs $19,000

The amazing part about the new ioDrive is that it delivers read and write speeds of 800MB/s and 600MB/s respectively. If you read previous threads on USB 2.0 technology you will find that even USB 2.0 cannot send data that fast. The ioDrive memory is designed around a revolutionary silicon-based storage architecture known as ioMemory. The ioDrive is the world’s most advanced NAND clustering technology with performance comparable to DRAM and storage capacity on par with today’s hard disks — giving you the power to improve both memory capacity and storage performance by up to one thousand times. The ioDrive dramatically increases performance such that every server can easily contain the I/O performance of the world’s fastest enterprise SAN. The cost of their flagship largest card is a whopping $19,000. Hopefully in time this cost will go down and companies can enjoy the incredible speed boost and safety of this solid state memory technology. In the mean time we are able to enjoy low cost portable custom flash drives that deliver a respectable 30 MB/s transmission speeds.

Biometric Flash Drives – The Promise of Secure Data

It’s likely that you have watched James Bond films and have seen him enter a secure location by his finger print. Well that technology is here today available on your custom usb flash drive. In a word, welcome to the world of Biometric authentication.

Custom USB Flash Drives are easily lost and corporations and businesses are increasingly interested in protecting their data. Biometric authentication is a safe and simple technology. All one does is scan their finger tip on the built in scanner and you become authenticated by the software loaded from the custom flash drive on the computer. It only takes a minute and the peace of mind it buys you in having a secure custom flash drive is quite large – depending on the value of the data.

USB 2.0 – Everything You Always Wanted to Know!

Universial Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 is a complete overhaul of the Universal Serial Bus input/output bus protocol which allows much higher speeds than the older USB 1.1 standard did. The goal of the new serial bus is to broaden the range of external peripherals that can be used on a computer. A hard drive can easily hit the USB 1.1 bottleneck whereas it now becomes more ‘usable’ under USB 2.0 conditions.

The attraction of USB 2.0 is clearly in its speed! USB 2.0 has a raw data rate at 480Mbps, and it is rated 40 times faster than its predecessor interface, USB 1.1, which tops at 12Mbps. Originally, USB 2.0 was intended to go only as fast as 240Mbps, but in October 1999, USB 2.0 Promoter Group pumped up the speed to 480Mbps.

Custom USB Flash Drives seem to be catching up too with the some hitting 30MB/s milestone. As for a lot of USB storage, burning a DVD-R at its fastest rate or 16x takes up 21MByte/s or 169Mbit/s. That translates to 35% of overall USB 2.0 speed. Hard drives, however, demand huge amount of bandwidth that USB 2.0 cannot meet; we’ve seen a USB 2.0 hard drive has sustained 36 to 40MBbyte/s in the absolute best scenario. USB flash drives have also reached 33MByte/s, but there seems to be some limitations in the NAND itself so you shouldn’t expect their speeds to skyrocket in a next year or two.

Using Windows Vista ReadyBoost with Your Handy USB Flash Drive

ReadyBoost is a technology only available in Windows Vista which allows a custom USB drive to be used for caching in order to boost performance of the PC. It basically takes some of the active system files that are randomly called upon and caches them on the flash drive. ReadyBoost employs a logical system on the drive to make access very quick and the end result is that requests for data from the customized USB drive are said to be 80-100 times faster than a hard drive. To use this, you just plug a compatible custom USB drive into a Vista-powered machine. The AutoPlay dialog will provide an additional option for speeding up the system. Select that option and you will get a Properties dialog window for the drive with an extra tab for ReadyBoost. Windows will test the drive to see if it is up to specs for ReadyBoost. For a USB drive to be ReadyBoost ready, it needs to be over 256MB, have an access time faster than 1 ms, be capable of 2.5 MB.s reads and 1.75 MB/s writes. It is also recommended that the USB drive be 1-3 times larger than the amount of system memory. So, for example, I have 2 gigs in my desktop. I should have a custom USB drive that is at least 2 gigs in capacity.

The 100GB USB Flash Drive

So will there be a 100GB Custom USB Flash Drive on the horizon? According to Samsung there will. Samsung hopes that falling prices for flash memory chips will mean solid-state memory can eventually replace hard drives in laptop computers and other devices. Samsung recently made its first step towards this goal with the announcement of a prototype 16GB custom flash drive based on flash chips. Flash memory has several advantages over hard-disk drive storage: it consumes less power, it has higher resistance to shock, and it’s more reliable because there are no moving parts, it can read and write data faster, and it’s silent in operation. Samsung cites flash memory price drops of around 40 percent in the last year as evidence that flash is quickly getting much cheaper and so 100GB custom USB Flash Drives will not necessarily cost a fortune to buy in the future. “This will be big once people enjoy how much faster and convenient it is to use solid-state disks rather than hard-disk drives,” said a Samsung company spokesman. “We’re starting with 16GB custom flash drives and expanding to 100GB in a couple of years.” Samsung is the world’s number one producer of custom flash drive chips with revenue more than double that of second-ranked Intel.

Is Your Company Data Safe?

A common use for a custom flash drive is to transfer files from work to home. If the customized flash drive was lost or stolen during the transport, proprietary company information would be compromised. In fact, most small to large companies have strict policies of what types of information can leave the premises. This highlights the importance of data encryption.

There are a number of software encryption products that will maintain data security even if the flash device falls into the wrong hands. In fact, most personalized USB flash drives come with some sort of free encryption software; however the free software may not meet your data protection requirements. If you use your custom flash drive for your company’s information or for your own personal information, be sure to purchase quality encryption software. The manufacturer of the custom jump drive device should have a recommendation of software on their Web site.

What Are the Risks of Using Portable Storage?

As far as reliability goes, custom USB flash drives are very durable. They are “hot-swappable”
(that is, removable without shutting down the computer) and “solid-state” (that is, no moving parts). They’re great for transferring data between computers. A British television program (”The Gadget Show”) decided to put flash drives to the test. They ran over them with a car, blasted them out of a cannon, and baked them in a soufflé at 400° F! What was the result? The flash drives shot out the cannon suffered because they were broken into little pieces; the rest worked just fine and retained their data.

For the majority of custom USB flash drive users, their drives will never go through that type of punishment. It seems that the biggest risk in using these devices is simply losing them! They are so small and compact that it would be easy to misplace a USB flash drive. Most of them come with neck strap or keychain clip that allow them to be with you constantly. Most industry sites define customized flash drives as a compact storage and transporting device whereas most dictionaries define custom flash drive memory as a computer chip with a read-only memory that can be electronically erased and reprogrammed without being removed from the circuit board. By definition, using a custom flash drive as an active storage area could pose a risk. For instance, one user used a custom flash drive like a second document folder. The user was creating and editing documents on the device with their word processor re-saving active documents every five minutes. This constant writing wore out the flash memory. Just like EEPROM chips, flash devices have a lifespan (this depends on the number of write cycles, check with the manufacturer find out the expectancy rates of your particular model), however, there is no limit to the number of times data can be read.

The History of the Flash Drive

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. The birth of the custom USB flash drive is credited to Dr. Fujio Masuoka. He invented NOR and NAND Flash Memory while working for Toshiba. The release of the first removable drive was in 1984, using Masuoka’s NOR Flash Memory. It was in 1984 when he invented NOR Flash Memory, which is the predecessor to NAND Flash Memory. NOR Flash Memory has long erase and write times but provides full address and data buses. This allows for random access to any memory location. It’s endurance is about 10,000 to 1,000,000 erase cycles. NOR based flash was the basis for early removable media.

In 1989, Toshiba announced the release of NAND flash. This was a ground-breaking moment in the history of flash drives. It has faster erase and write times, and requires a smaller chip are per cell. This allows for greater storage capacities and lower costs than NOR Flash Memory. NAND Flash Memory is also more durable than NOR Flash Memory.

NAND Flash does not provide a random-access external bus. This makes NAND a bad choice to replace program ROM, but an ideal one for mass-storage. In 1996, some computer manufacturers began to produce computers with USB ports and support for USB connectivity. With the release of the iMac in 1998, came the widespread use of customized USBs. They are expected to completely replace serial and parallel ports. The Custom Flash Drive is a NAND Flash Memory device with an integrated USB connector. The Custom Flash Drive as you know it today was invented by Dov Moran. He engineered the integration of a USB connector to a NAND Flash Device.