Our advice

We like to be honest with our customers and that’s why we’ve created this tips page.

When looking for USB Flash Drives, we know how easy it can be to go for the cheapest quote you receive. However, are you sure you know what you’re getting for the price? We’ve heard so many bad stories in the past so we want to make sure these don’t happen to you!

Firstly, some companies will give you a price for a given quantity, say 1000 units. It may appear cheap but you have to ask yourself what are you getting for that price? Does it include logo printing, packaging, delivery, VAT, design charges, data loading etc. Most companies charge extra for these options. Example costs for these would be around 4p per colour on the logo per unit, 25p for packaging per unit, £15 delivery, £35 design fees, data loading 5p per unit – all plus VAT. On 1000 units, this adds up to almost £600! At The Unusual USB Company Ltd, we tell you exactly what you’re getting from the start so you don’t get any surprises.

Our next bit of advice is also very important for you to know. There are so many companies (both in the UK and China) who are supplying ‘fake’ USB Flash Drives. This is where companies program the memory chip to trick computers into thinking that the flash drive holds more data that it actually does. For example what is actually a 1GB flash drive could be made to appear as an 8GB flash drive. The consequence of this is that when you load more than 1GB of data on to the flash drive, it will crash and lock up, meaning you have lost your data and the flash drive is likely to become corrupt and unusable. We can be trusted at The Unusual USB Company Ltd because we import our memory chips directly from the World’s top 3 manufacturers of memory chips; Samsung, Hynix and Toshiba. We also have high quality control standards. We spot check our flash drives right before delivery to ensure we’re getting everything right.

This leads on to our next piece of advice which is make sure you buy from a reputable company who offer after sales service. We’ll be honest with you, flash drives do fail from time to time and although we always do our very best to ensure this doesn’t happen, it is sometimes unavoidable. From experience, we have found that around 0.3% of all flash drives fail. The main cause of this is damage in transit and carelessness in handling them. The unfortunate thing is that you cannot tell if they are faulty until they are plugged in to a computer. As we’ve just mentioned, we spot check our flash drives before delivery but unfortunately we can’t test every single flash drive out of the thousands we supply so some faulty ones do slip through. At The Unusual USB Company Ltd, we pride ourselves in our after sales service and this is why we now offer a 3 year warranty on our flash drives (that’s more than the manufacturers’ warranty!)

To ensure you don’t have any problems with your flash drives always ensure that you handle them with care. Even a slight knock could damage them. Another piece of advice is to use the “Safely Remove Hardware” function on your computer. This will ensure that all data-flow is stopped to the flash drive so it cannot get corrupted. If you don’t use this feature, at least close the flash drive explorer window and wait 5 seconds before removing. Never remove a flash drive while data is being transferred to it. This will cause data corruption and can lead to corrupting the flash drive completely. A final tip is to format the flash drive when you want to clear it (don’t just deleted everything individually). Formatting the card is a method where the flash drive is cleared fully. On a Windows PC, the easiest way to do this is to right-click on the USB flash drive icon in my computer and select ‘Format...’. If you simply delete the files, fragments of the files get left behind on the flash drive which can eventually build up and corrupt the flash drive.