Having trouble getting customers to take your surveys? Customer feedback is valuable to marketing, but it’s hard to get people to respond. Sometimes writing a few lines on the bottom of a receipt about entering a contest to win a gift card just isn’t enough to get people to leave feedback. Some people want to go for any chance to win something for free, but many others are skeptical about offers that they know they may be entering along with hundreds of thousands of other people when only one or two will win.

Encourage customer feedback with free flash drive offers

You need to offer an incentive that people will want but also that they know they have a chance to win that prize. Instead of offering a large prize that only a few people can win, why not offer a prize of less value that people still want and that more can have a chance to win? You could consider purchasing bulk flash drives to use for this purpose.

You could offer, say, 50 custom flash drives and give the chance to enter a survey to a few hundred customers. Many of them will get the flash drives, and they can know that they’ll have a decent chance of winning. They would have to go to a website and fill out several questions on a survey of their experience with the store to win a USB drive.

The USB drive itself is a good marketing device if you take advantage of the many ways CFgear offers to customize these drives. You can imprint your company name and logo in up to four colors using super-accurate Pantone color matching to ensure that the colors look exactly the way you want them. On some models you can even choose laser engraving for an especially classy look.

Make custom USB drives an integral part of your campaign to get people to fill out your surveys. You could select just certain people by printing info on their receipts. You could market the survey promotion with posters around the store reminding people to go to the website and fill out the questions. Whatever method you choose, many people will want to try to win a USB drive and won’t mind filling out a few questions.

Of course, you want to write questions that will elicit honest answers and also not consume too much time from customers. And you want to make sure that management people use the feedback to implement new policies and not just aimlessly gather data. Then you can make your managers happy with feedback to use and make customers happy with free flash drives.

You could even add an extra marketing opportunity by preloading links to company websites with various promotions. At CFgear, we use our trademarked Pulse technology to accurately load data onto drives and duplicate them as many times as you need.

Consider using bulk custom USB drives to promote company surveys. Check out what CFgear can do for you.

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How Long Does a Flash Drive Last?

by CFgear on December 20, 2009

I’ve always wondered how long a flash drive would last, and so, I’ve decided to do some research on the subject and share it with everyone. First, let’s clarify the question as there really are two parts to it, and I’d like to examine both:

  1. How many times can you write to a flash drive before it stops working?
  2. How long will a flash drive retain its data?

Wikipedia tries to answer both questions with a simple statement: “Some allow 1 million write or erase cycles and have a 10 year data retention cycle.”

That’s sounds overly simplistic. Let’s address each part of the question and see what we can learn:

#1 How many times can you write to a flash drive before it stops working?

Wikipedia’s footnotes on the same USB flash drive page mentioned above state: “USB flash drives allow reading, writing, and erasing of data, with some allowing 1 million write/erase cycles in each cell of memory: if 100 uses per day, 1 million cycles could span 10,000 days or over 27 years. Some devices level the usage by auto-shifting activity to underused sections of memory.”

I’ve seen some companies’ descriptions of flash drives with the read/write limit varying from 10,000 to 1 million. Why? While there are some variations in flash memory cells, most likely some are referring to the older way of describing read/write which related to any particular cell. However, things have changed with the newer, higher quality flash drives. Due to the auto-shifting activity mentioned in the Wikipedia article (or “wear leveling” as described by Michael Yang, flash marketing manager for Samsung, in his early 2008 defense of flash memory for use in computers), a flash device that is rated 10,000 write cycles can write 10,000 times to every single flash memory cell in the device. A flash device can then rotate which memory cells are written to and redirect the “read stream” of data to good cells in the event some cells become defective.

Here’s an interesting article on the Japanese scientists who engineered new flash drives that can last virtually indefinitely through flash drive wear leveling. With automatic “wear leveling,” you then could theoretically write to a newer, premium flash drive day in and day out for years before the drive “dies.”

And, in terms of flash drive death, as Josh Bressers writes based on his study, writing 90,593,104 times to a flash drive with the intention of making it die, flash drive death only means one thing -  you can no longer write to it, but you can still read data from it.

BitMicro has a helpful press release in defense of flash memory. Of special interest is the “Longevity/Lifespan” section which mentions that “currently the best flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block (with 8,000 blocks per chip).”

#2 How long will a flash drive retain its data?

The second facet of the question is also a crucial one that many people have asked. Most of us have heard that flash drives can only retain data for so long even without a couple million read/writes.

In regard to this question, Ben Hodgens, on Josh Bressers’ post mentioned above, writes: “It’s hard to say how long a flash drive will ‘last.’ It’s going to be subject to the same electro/magnetic deterioration any other electronic or magnetic media is subject to: over time, the cells will lose their charge state, resulting in the discreet 1s and 0s being muddled.”

I haven’t been able to find much information on gradual memory loss in flash drives. Wikipedia does have an article on bit rot which briefly mentions flash drives. As Ben Hodgens mentions in the above referenced article, “we’ve not had flash drives long enough to  make a concrete determination.” As with any form of memory which relies on electro/magnetic charges, inevitably, decay will happen.

Though flash drives are superb for <10 years short term archival (like the floppy disks of yesterday or even magnetic tapes, CDs, and DVDs), they are finite in their endurance. While Japanese scientists exercise their brains to develop methods to ensure continued longetivity with flash drives, you can rest assured that a quality flash drive will provide you with meaningful, valuable use during the oft quoted 10 years of its reliable life; however, as with any other form of technology, don’t use them for single source archival and be sure to upgrade to larger, newer devices every couple of years. Right now, it’s easy to do that as the memory capacity for flash drives continues to increase (and prices for higher capacity drives become more affordable). If you have crucial data, don’t just set it on the shelf archived forever; store it on the latest technology and continually upgrade to be sure you’ll be able to have continued access as your technology changes. What would you do if you’d locked away all your important data on relatively obsolete 5 1/4 inch floppy disks? After all, we’ve been upgrading what we use to store data on all along for the past couple of decades, mostly subconsciously probably: floppy disks, CDs, DVDS, flash drives, and the list will only continue.

And so, in summary, thanks to the continued improvements in USB flash drive technology, flash drives are becoming better and better with longer lifetimes and increased reliability. While there are some limitations, as with any technology, flash drives remain an incredible investment and an easy, portable tool that tens of millions worldwide (including me, and probably you too) use every day. It’s because of this that we, at CFgear, push custom flash drives as an ideal promotional tool for businesses, schools and nonprofits. But don’t just take our word for it – give it an honest try and see what you think.

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What is the biggest USB flash drive?

December 1, 2009

Flash memory capacities keep climbing, but the current largest mass marketed USB flash drive is the Kingston DataTraveler 300 which boasts a whopping 256GB. To translate that into everyday data storage terms, that means this Goliath flash drive is equivalent to any of the following:
1) 365 CDs (at approximately 700 MB each)
2) 54 DVDs (at [...]

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Develop Study Skills Flash Drives for Students

November 29, 2009

Everyone either is a student now or has been at some point in his life. Everyone has sat through hours of boring lectures, doodling in a notebook, surfing the internet on a laptop, texting friends across the aisle, or actually half trying to pay attention and remember what the teacher is saying. Once in college, [...]

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Save Trees with Flash Drive Catalogs

November 28, 2009

After I received a box of clothes I’d ordered recently, I cut through the packing tape and flipped up the cardboard top. I reached inside, thinking to find my new shirts, only to find a catalog. I pulled that out, only to find a brochure that promised free shipping on any order I completed within [...]

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Flash Drive Prices Continue to Increase

November 28, 2009

Thanks to the escalated demand by Apple for more flash memory chips, there is a serious shortage of availability for the memory chips also used in manufacturing flash drives. With decreased availability comes an increase in prices charged by overseas factories for the core parts used in making USB flash drives.
According to TechChips:
2GB flash memory [...]

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Sell E-books on Custom USB Flash Drives

October 27, 2009

With products like smartphones and e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle, people increasingly read on little electronic devices instead of from paper books. Many websites also make books available for people to read on their screens. As people move away from print materials gradually but steadily, publishers have to adapt to the changing market. Paperback and [...]

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College Correspondence Courses on USB Flash Drives

October 20, 2009

College students who want to put their vacations to good use often take a correspondence course. They might take this course through their own college or might find a local community college that offers the same course. They can get a few credits out of the way and also find something to occupy their time [...]

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Sell Background Music for Conferences Preloaded on Flash Drives

October 12, 2009

Background music usually adds an enjoyable effect at a conference. Music played over loudspeakers helps people to relax and focus. Or what about a banquet or wedding reception? Usually the hosts hire someone to play music or else play music over speakers. Some buildings are too small or are simply not suitable for live musicians [...]

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Diet Plan Plus Flash Drives Equals Success!

October 7, 2009

Dieting is a fad that never dies. But new diets come along constantly, and experts are always pushing some different food or supplement to keep your health well above par. One person says you can eat ice cream all you want if you eat the right foods along with it. Another lauds the great benefits [...]

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