USB mirroring: when a DVD isn’t big enough

USB mirroring: the benefits

Like any other form of medium, there are positives and negatives to USB mirroring. These are the main points to consider:

Advantage:

1) memory size – An 8GB memory card contains twice as much data as a regular DVD, and as mentioned above, you can get 512GB memory cards if necessary.

2) Versatility – You can print your company logo on your memory cards and the variety of designs available is amazing.

4) Reuse – You can choose to partition your memory cards when they are duplicated, so that the recipient can use any unused space on them. That way, your company logo will always be in front of the user. A CD or DVD cannot be reused and may be viewed once and then lost in a drawer or a pile of other marketing material. Provide a lanyard or keychain with your USB stick for convenience and continued brand recognition.

5) Security – Copy protection and full digital rights management are available for your USB sticks. The data cannot be erased, it will be copy protected, password protected and even printable if necessary. Any good USB mirroring service provider will provide this service.

USB mirroring: the drawbacks

1) Cost – For many projects, cost is an important consideration and USB mirroring is substantially more expensive than DVD mirroring. As with most things, the more you order, the lower the unit cost. When you consider the variety of advantages above and the requirements of your project, the cost tradeoff is usually easy to accept.

2) time – Usually, due to the large amount of data to be transferred to the drive, USB mirroring takes a little longer than DVD mirroring. If you do not have a very tight deadline, this will not be a problem for you.

Choosing your USB memory stick style

If you’ve started looking for USB sticks for your project, you may have noticed the bewildering variety of styles and designs that are available to you. The actual flash memory itself is small and flat so the case can be pretty much any shape you want, and if you have many thousands then it might be worth asking about custom moldings to suit your company logo.

You are not limited in any way to plastic trim for your USB drive casing, depending on your industry category, you can go for a wood or metal trim. Flash memory can also be attached to other useful devices such as business cards, flashlights, pens, or bottle openers.

The USB mirroring process

Businesses that provide a USB mirroring service, usually a media mirroring provider, will use a mirroring drive that can be loaded with many drives at once. Depending on the amount of work the company does with USB drives, they can use mirror drives with between 20 and 60 ports.

The mirroring drive also houses a master drive and all blank drives receive their data from this master drive which remains on the drive until the required number of drives has been produced.

For a large volume of high-capacity drives, this process will take a long time, so the more mirroring drives available, the faster an order can be completed. Bit-level data comparison between the master and the contents of each drive ensures a working copy every time, as faulty memory cards would fail when duplicating.

USB mirroring drives don’t need a PC to run them, and a 60-port device doesn’t take up much space. In addition, loading and unloading, which must be done manually, is a very simple disconnect and plug-in process. Keeping duplicate and blank media separate is important as you cannot tell just by looking at the USB drive whether it has been duplicated as is possible with a CD or DVD.

Printing to USB drives

The process used to print on most USB drives that can receive a print is screen printing, which will apply up to 4 spot colors to the printable area of ​​the drive. It’s a great way to ensure that your company logo and phone number are always visible to the end user of the device.

There is a slight downside with screen printing directly on the body of the unit where the unit is used very frequently and constantly being handled, kept in a pocket or with a set of keys etc, eventually the print will start to scratch and with time will disappear. The silkscreen printing on the drives is very robust and will usually take a great deal of time to print, but there is an alternative method of attaching your logo to a USB drive and protecting it with a non-scratch epoxy resin. This is known as “domed” printing because the clear epoxy resin has a curved surface over the printed area on the USB drive.