USB Drive Standards and Quality

In the promotional products industry, there are about 3-4,000 suppliers who can logo anything from a pen to a refrigerator and just about anything in between. So I was recently doing research for a client for some usb drives. Because they wanted a small number, I contacted 3 different suppliers who each had a 5 star rating (the highest) and the prices were just about the same. In the distant past I had shied away from selling them because I wasn't educated enough with the quality or guarantee or pretty much anything else about them except that I knew you could store data and transfer data using them. Here's what I've discovered over the past year or two. USB drive technology is a commodity and prices are usually set every week by the factories that make them for that week. And as I read in a recent article, you get what you pay for. There are no standards to supervise the quality. Manufacturer ID is very important when buying them as it's just about the only identifying quality standard. USB drives usually have a failure rate between 2-10% on a straight duplication of information. USB drives purchased from a top tier supplier have a failure rate of .1%. Big difference! In the article, the writer stated he was duplicating drives for a top end car manufacturer and discovered a 30% failure rate. He went back and reran the 70% that had passed on the first run and came up with another 30% failure rate - in the end, most of them were bad. So, if you're in the market for usb drives, it's important to know the brand and that it's from a top tier manufacturer. Be sure that the company you purchase from is going to guarantee the product. Sometimes the quality of the logo product you give to a client or prospect can reflect on the quality of your company.