One of the fun activities we get to participate in about once per month at CFgear is quality testing. We bring in drives from varied sources including vendors, major retailers, online e-commerce sites and nearly anyone we can find who is in the business of marketing flash drives. We buy across all price points, types and shapes, including custom flash drives.

In June we focused on custom Class B+C or Tier 2+3 flash drives and compared them with what we offer. We run tests on speed, durability and data retention. Although we can’t do cool time elapsed videos, we do our best to simulate both drives in our duplication racks to keep the testing equal. We’ll detail what we found in a later discussion, but felt it was important to first discuss the different classes or categories that exist for flash drives so here is a basic breakdown.

Tier One (Class A) Flash Drives
These are premium chips with the manufacturer’s name and serial number typically printed on the chips. At CFgear, we use Hynix, Samsung, Intel and Micron. They are the most expensive chips, but also come with a lifetime warranty, as all CFgear flash drives do! If your suppliers offers anything less, hopefully we can help you understand your risk below.

Tier Two (Class B) Flash Drives
Typically these are OEM chips, which basically means they are reliable but are not tested to the same standards as branded chips from the same manufacturers above. We see many of these chips in the low end capacities such as 64MB or 128MB drives. These are still of good quality, but they typically cost about 10% less than Class A chips. These are RARELY seen in any flash drives above 512MB.

Tier Three (Class C) Flash Drives
These are some of the least expensive flash drives on the market. If you see a price give or take 10%, you are usually dealing with a quality supplier. If you see a price give or take 20% or more, you are likely comparing across different flash drive categories. This can be very dangerous. Why? The “recycled” or “reused” chips used to produce these flash drives are leftover portions of original wafers, recycled chips from recycled cell phones, toys and a host of other products. Typically you’ll see 30-40% failure rates on this class of drives and data retention loss beginning in as quickly as 10 cycles (a cycle is a save and delete of a file) as we saw with our tests. They also run very hot, and you can consistently feel that warmth if you leave the drive in a USB port for more than two minutes.

Some folks will say that there are even lower flash drive classifications, but we sure hope not. We have heard of those unscrupulous vendors who use SW to “charge” a flash drive… or make it initially read at a capacity much higher than the drive actually can actually store. We have yet to run across any of these, but we know they are out there.

Lastly, and we’ll touch on this on our next post, but one flash drive buyer (who is now a customer of CFgear) told us they ordered from another company and just received the memory chips! At times, you can find what looks like very low prices on flash drives, but the price only includes the flash memory chip. The housing, circuit board and assembly are not included! Shipping is another notorious bug bite. If you happen to purchase from a vendor who looks like a vendor in the US, but shipping charges seem outrageous, you know you are purchasing your drives from a vendor based in the UK, Germany or China…. not South Dakota, and we would almost bet you your next Starbucks coffee that you are not falling into the top Tiers of flash drives classes!

Until next time, we are on your side and your friend in the flash drive business!