When Branded USB Memory Sticks Just Aren’t Big Enough

When it comes to saving and carrying relatively large amounts of digital information around with you USB Memory Sticks are hard to beat. They are small, compact, lightweight and plug into any PC or Mac that has a USB port on it. Pretty much everyone instinctively knows how to use them and they are now commonly used by a very broad demographic from students to grandparents.

USB memory sticks are available in a wide range of memory sizes from 256MB to a whopping 64GB, albeit the larger 64GB versions are still incredibly expensive. To put this into context, a fairly typical 4GB USB memory stick can hold around 4,000 music tracks, 8-10,000 photographs, and tens of thousands of documents. So whilst we’re all saving more and more information an average USB stick is typically large enough for most peoples needs.

This may change with the growing popularity of digital video and movies that are available for download over the Internet, including HD videos. These files are significantly larger and will drive demand for more storage options in the near future.

For now the USB memory sticks is the dominant product in the portable memory market and its adoption by the promotional sector as a “give-away” and/or corporate gift has ensured its success. It’s not unusual these days to go to trade shows, press events, student fresher fairs and other promotional events and to walk away with several “free” branded USB memory sticks.

Smart companies are not only printing their brands and logos on these free flash drives but they are also pre-loading their sales brochures, product reviews, media files, web links and other marketing material onto the flash drives before they are handed out.

But, in some cases USB memory sticks are either not big enough to cost effectively carry the information a company wants to pre-load and distribute or they are not considered “special” enough to hand out to high net worth clients, partners and prospects. So, if you are looking for something a little different, a little more exclusive and something with a storage capacity not measured in Gigabytes but Terabytes then you might want to consider a portable hard disk drive.

Portable hard disk drives can be branded; the data on them can be secured using RFID and encryption technology, they are relatively small and portable (about the same size as a pocket diary) and they hold tons of data. More significantly in terms of cost per GB of storage they are hugely cheaper.

Whilst portable hard disks drives are unlikely to knock USB flash drives off their top spot for portable storage anytime soon they are a very interesting and cost effective alternative.