How Big Can a USB Flash Drive Get?

How big can a USB flash drive get? That’s the question on our minds. When the first USB flash drive was sold under 11 years ago in December 2000 the memory capacity was only 8MB.  Although to us, that seems extremely small and almost pointless, at the time it was more than five times the size of the standard flash drive at only 1.44MB.  This revolutionised data transfer and made larger information much more portable because the memory capacity was there but it was also easier to carry as the device was a lot smaller than the floppy disc.  At this time broadband was not as widely used as today and the annoying whine of dial-up Internet was still widely heard so data transfer over the internet was not really an option as it was still quite painfully slow.

Huge 256GB Flash Drive

A year or two ago Kingston announced the release of their Kingston DataTraveller 300 flash drive that had the largest storage capacity seen on a portable USB flash drive of 256GB.  At 32,000 times the size of the original 8MB flash drive things have come a long way in just under 10 years but customers will pay for the privilege.  The cost of the DataTraveller 300 flash drive is around a staggering £800.  Unfortunately however, the drive was only USB 2.0 which meant that the read speed is only 20 Mbps and the write speed is 10 Mbps.  This means that it would take around three and a half hours to download all of the 256GB from the drive and just over 7 hours to transfer 256GB onto the drive.  Thankfully, since the release of the first 256GB USB flash drive we have seen the release of USB 3.0 256GB flash drives which have a much faster read and write speeds and cost half the price.

A 256GB promotional USB flash drive might be a novelty but would probably not be a good move financially.  Although we’re sure customers would love to receive a 256BG flash drive for free or even at a cut price, in most cases we’re sure that for most companies the returns would not compensate for the £400 per flash drive.  Flash memory is now even starting to replace hard drives, more commonly known as Solid-State Drives for this purpose, as it is faster, quieter and uses less power but is currently very expensive at around £2,500 for 600GB.

Our flash drive sizes range from a relatively small quantity of 64MB all the way up to 16GB and in some cases up to 32GB. To pick the data size of your Logo USB memory stick will usually depend on the purpose of the flash drive, our largest selling branded USB flash drive sizes are around 1GB to 2GB as this is still a very useful size for most of the data that people have to transfer around.  The memory size however, is not the most important factor in picking a promotional USB memory stick, it usually takes second place to the model, colours and design.  For this reason we try to offer our customers with a large range of models, colours, designs, options and ultimate customising when picking the perfect logo USB memory stick for your company.