Yes, there are million flash drives in the market. This one is a bit clever don’t you think? Buy the 4GB drive off Urban Outfitters. Create your own multimedia message with audio, video or text and save it to this flash drive. Throw it into the ocean and see what happens.
Source: Buy from Urban Outfitters.
Continue ReadingThere are two ways on “How to make a USB read only.” One method will make the USB read-only in anything it is connected to, so you could say this is a universal way of making a flash drive write protected.
The other way is a PC-specific solution where some registry edits are required to any computer the USB flash drive is connected to.
When we say 100% permanent, this means the USB stick is read only (write protected) on all devices, whether it be computers like a Mac, Windows PC, Linux box, or non-processor based products like a car stereo. This permanent solution also means the status of the drive cannot be changed. The other method flags a USB device to be read only in relationship to the PC it is connected to so that whenever that USB stick is connected to that computer, it makes the USB read only and blocks all write commands to the device.
Most times an IT manager or content owner wants the USB stick to be read only so the files cannot be deleted or formatted off the drive. Another reason for making a USB read only is for the original files to remain the same and block the ability for files to be changed or manipulated. Finally, it’s smart to have USBs read only so that viruses don’t jump onto the drive and possibly spread to other computers.
You will need a Windows7 machine or higher. The Windows7 machine will have DiskPart utility which allows us to perform all sorts of cool things to flash drives, like setting write protection.
This will run your Command Prompt.
Now you will need to find the USB stick connected to your PC. Most likely it’s DISK 1
UPDATE: The Nexcopy USB flash drive inkjet printer has been upgraded to the new LOGO-EZ PRINTER, a 40-up full-color inkjet printer designed specifically for USB flash drive branding. The LOGO-EZ features a fully customized tray that securely holds USB drives in place during printing. Pricing starts around $3,500. For current product specs and availability, visit Nexcopy.com.
Note: The following section refers to the discontinued USB7P model. Nexcopy now offers an improved USB flash drive inkjet printer under the LOGO-EZ name. See Nexcopy’s site for current models.
Nexcopy introduced the USB7P USB flash drive inkjet printer as a compact desktop solution for professional, full-color branding of USB swivel drives. Unlike traditional third-party printing services that require bulk orders and long lead times, the USB7P allowed businesses to take control of their branding process directly from their office. With the ability to print custom logos, promotional graphics, or product-specific designs onto the metal swivel clips of USB drives, companies could create fully personalized flash drives on demand.
This inkjet printer for USB flash drives supported widely used file formats like JPEG and bitmap, making it easy for users to import their artwork and align it accurately to each clip. Designed for efficiency, the USB7P produced vivid, high-resolution prints in less than a minute. Whether for small-run marketing giveaways, corporate training tools, or private-label media distribution, the USB7P gave organizations a flexible and cost-effective way to customize USB drives in-house without sacrificing print quality or turnaround time.
The USB7P utilizes specially designed printable swivel clips provided by Nexcopy, which replace the standard metal clips commonly found on traditional USB flash drives. These printable clips are engineered to fit perfectly on most standard swivel-style flash drives, making it easy to transform a generic drive into a custom-branded product. One of the standout features of this system is the ability to swap out the clips at any time—a major advantage for businesses that frequently update their branding, change promotional campaigns, or require multilingual packaging.
For example, if your logo undergoes a redesign or seasonal artwork is required for a limited-time offer, you can simply print new clips and replace the old ones without needing to purchase entirely new drives. This modular approach to USB branding not only saves cost but also greatly enhances operational flexibility. Companies can even produce different color variations of the same logo or design to align with specific departments, product lines, or event themes—all from the same batch of flash drives.
Powered by HP’s advanced inkjet technology, the USB7P USB flash drive inkjet printer supports over 11 million colors with spot-on PMS color matching. Whether you’re printing a vibrant photo, a subtle watermark, or a two-tone logo, the output remains sharp, consistent, and high-resolution. The printer can produce a full-color set of seven USB clips in just 35 seconds, delivering fast, professional results with minimal effort and no drying time required.
Setup was simple: install drivers, load the 7-slot clip tray, and launch the included Nexcopy software. The printer’s onboard camera helped align your artwork with precision. To print the reverse side, just flip the clips and print again—no drying time needed.
The USB7P USB flash drive inkjet printer was specifically engineered to meet the dynamic needs of modern corporations, where product labeling, software revisions, or branding updates can change rapidly and often with little notice. In industries where management frequently mandates last-minute design or version updates—such as software development, medical devices, education, or government—the ability to perform in-house USB flash drive customization becomes not just a convenience but a necessity.
Unlike outsourcing, which introduces lead times, minimum order quantities, and increased costs, the USB7P allowed organizations to react quickly to evolving requirements. Whether it was a rebranded product suite, a new software patch, or an internal initiative that needed fast deployment, the USB7P gave teams the ability to print full-color, professional-grade USB swivel clips in real time—on demand, and in small or large batches.
Its capability to print seven clips simultaneously with unique or identical artwork made it ideal for short-run branding jobs, quick-turn marketing promotions, sales samples, trade shows, beta program rollouts, or even internal asset labeling. This level of flexibility empowered departments to keep pace with marketing, compliance, or operational directives without relying on third-party suppliers or long production schedules.
Though the USB7P has since been replaced by the more powerful LOGO-EZ printer, the core concept remains the same: give corporate users the ability to control their USB branding pipeline from start to finish—affordably, efficiently, and on their own schedule.
Here is the Pilatus airplane
Here is a Hawker airplane
Here is the F16 and F35 planes designed by Lockheed Martin
These are all very impressive designs and certainly a piece of swag any trade show junkie, or even executive, would love to have. Times have certainly changed. The source for these designs is through a company named www.USBCOPIER.com and these products or any customized design can be created, just contact them.
Continue Reading
The Corsair Voyager Go USB is available as a 3.0 device in 16, 32 and 64GB capacity. USB 3.0 can boost transfer speeds in excess of 135MB/s however we must realize this spec is not real-world environment.
Source:Â Corsair, CES.
Continue Reading
Longevity of USB Flash and Wear Leveling we think is a serious concern and have received this question many times. Some say the number is 1,000 writes – some say the number is 100,000 writes. One thing I do know for sure, it’s impossible to tell on any one specific device. The life cycle of a USB is directly related to the flash memory…and from model to model or style to style, who knows what quality of flash is used. With that said, we can still explain the theory behind making USB drives last longer. For the most part it boils down to several elements A) the memory type and quality and B) the wear leveling technique.
As a quick summary the NAND flash in USB can be either SLC, MLC or TLC (single cell, multi-layer cell or triple-layer cell memory). Typically you will find MLC and now mostly TLC in USB sticks. SLC can be found but typically on the very high-end devices.
Wear leveling is a technique to prolong the life of the erasable flash memory. To summarize, flash memory has individual, erasable segments that can be set as zeros or ones (set as either positive or negative charge). However, after a certain number of erase and write cycles the segment (cell) becomes too unstable for reliable use.
Wear leveling is the algorithm used by the controller on the device which attempts to arrange the erase and writes evenly across the flash medium. Typically flash can have a cycle between 3,000 and 5,000 erase/writes. In addition to the usable area, the flash also has some cells with specific blocks for extended life which can handle up to 100,000 writes. This is the area where the controller makes note of the segments previously used and maps out the next best cells to use during an erase/write cycle.
No wear leveling – A Flash memory storage system with no wear leveling will not last very long if it is writing data to the flash. Without wear leveling, the Flash controller must permanently assign the logical addresses from the host computer to the physical addresses of the Flash memory. This means that every write to a previously written block must first be read, erased, modified, and re-written to the same location. This is very time consuming and highly written locations will wear out quickly with other locations even being completely unused. Once a few blocks reach their end of life the drive is no longer operable.
The first developed type of leveling is called dynamic wear leveling and it uses a map to link logical block addresses from the host to the physical Flash memory. Each time the host writes replacement data, the map is updated so the original physical block is marked as invalid data, and a new block is linked to that map entry. Each time a block of data is re-written to the Flash memory it is written to a new location.
The other type of wear leveling is called static wear leveling which also uses a map to link the block addresses to physical memory addresses. Static wear leveling works the same as dynamic wear leveling except the static blocks that do not change are periodically moved so that these low-usage cells are able to be used by other data. This rotational effect of block addressing enables a USB or SSD to operate until most of the blocks are near their end of life.
The above are three types of wear leveling and there are three types of techniques used to extend the life of a USB drive.
Code which is kept and logs bad blocks so they cannot be used again in future writes.
Where if a write fails to a block it can be re-routed to the pool of reserved blocks and written there.
Blocks on the media can be tracked in a least recently used queue of some sort. The data structures for the queue itself must be wear leveled as well as this queue information is constantly changing.
Source: Wikipedia and Nexcopy Inc. USB duplicator manufacturer.
Burning CDs is slow and impractical when at a clients site. In addition, who wants to leave behind their 16GB flash drive with a mix of personal and professional information? With that said, we designed a small pack of drives we could tear and use when needed. Since we travel and present files to clients this gives us an easy, inexpensive and creative way to leave files with the client.
The design lends itself to the old-school flyers you’d see around town for a local band playing at a pub or someone looking to offer odd-job services. The physical form factor says it all…quick, easy, here-ya-go.
Each pack of four is recycled paper used as it’s chassis/case and COB memory and USB connector (Chip On Board) for the memory. Each tab is perforated for easy tear and use functionality.
The designer Kurt Rampton of Bolt Group offers the drives in a couple different
Continue Reading
The two largest manufacturers of flash memory (NAND memory) are Samsung and Toshiba. Together they account for about 70% of the world’s flash. These companies produce a wide variety of flash memory models and the factories have various levels of quality for the output of their product.
Typically the high performance memory that gets the best test ratings is sold to large consumers like Apple, Nokia and Sony. As the ratings for the speed of the memory drop, these variants get pushed into the low-end market segments, such as USB drives and inexpensive MP3 players and other promotional gadgets.
In Q3 2012 Toshiba made an announcement they will reduce world wide production by 30%. Since this time, flash pricing has remained stable and has not decreased in cost.
With the on-going patent battles between Apple and Samsung the Cupertino based company made a decision
Continue Reading
As with any good project, there should always be a back up plan. The Curiosity for Mars is no different. The system has a B-Side computer in the event the A-Side computer went down…well guess what, it went down.
There is a theory that cosmic rays affected some of the flash memory on Curiosity causing the A-Side computer to shut down and reboot into Safe Mode.
JPL is currently backup up the A-Side data to the B-Side computer and should reboot by weeks end. Configuration and data transfer can take a while, then of course the verification process of everything done right.
JPL states:
“The hardware that we fly is radiation tolerant, but there’s a limit to how hardened it can be, you can still get high-energy particles that can cause the memory to be corrupted. It certainly is a possibility and that’s what we’re looking into.”For updates please visit the NASA website. Continue Reading
DELL, so it is said, started a new code project call Ophelia. The project is turning a USB key into a portable desktop. The USB would have the ability to access online software tools and operating systems. The USB solution from Ophelia will still require a hardware setup (someone’s PC) so think of it as a USB stick high-jacking the processor, RAM, motherboard, video controller etc to run it’s own OS.
We’ve seen things like this from smaller, start-up companies, but DELL has the ability to really make this main stream. The rumor on target price is $50 US Dollars.
I for one believe the ability to high-jack another PCs hardware doesn’t warrant it enough to be more then a complimentary tool to one’s main PC. Now if DELL can high-jack the
Continue Reading
The $149.99 Slim Drive P9223 by LaCie, powered by none other than USB 3.0, follows the same minimalist design set by Porsche Design. It has a thickness of a mere 11mm; this makes it a great compliment to a 17mm slim MacBook. It’s chassis is made of solid aluminum which doubles as a heat sink for fast dissipation of any heat build up from the NAND chips.
The LaCie Porsche SSD can top a transfer speed of 400/MBs. But it’s not a walk in the park to get that data transfer rate. You need to have a computer which supports the USB Attached SCSI [UAS] protocol. This is a protocol which overcomes the aging bulk-only transport method which has been around since USB 1.0.
Source:Â EverythingUSB.
Continue Reading
