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.

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.

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.

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.