Things To Look Out For Before Buying a Pendrive

For one reason or the other, anyone who has lived after 1998 has ever come across a pen drive and possibly used one before.

Pen drives were introduced in 1998 to ease the frustration associated with using CDs and Floppy disks as alternative data storages to the hard disk.

Frankly, since the introduction of pen drives or flash drives, data storage has become a lot easier and faster.

But, when purchasing your Pendrive, there are a few things you need to know. For most people, they just check the storage capacity written on the drives and then they issue payment.

It’s understandable. But sincerely, this could be just about the perfect way to throw away money – most times.

In this article, we shall take you through some few things to look out for when buying a pen drive.

We also wrote about Things To Look Out For When Buying a Memory Card.

Transfer Speed

Depending on the volume of data that you want to store on your pen drive and how fast you need that to be done, you should consider speed when buying the drive.

There are basically two types of pen drives – based on speed. There’s the 2.0 drive and the 3.0 drive.

The latter is faster than the former. With the 2.0, it can process data at 60 MB per seconds while the 3.0 can process data at about 640 MB per seconds.

Now, the catch is that you should also consider the capacity of the computer you’re using your pen drive in.

Most modern computers support USB 3.0 which means they are suitable to be used with pen drives with 3.0 speed.

However, older machines only support 2.0. So if you have such machines, you should only go for pen drives at 2.0 speed.

One thing to note is that if you use a 3.0-speed pen drive in a computer that supports 2.0, the pen drive speed will automatically reduce to 2.0.

Why You Want To Buy The Pendrive

More than anything else, you should have a reason for buying a pendrive.

And that reason should form an integral part of your decision-making process regarding which drive you should buy.

Reasons for buying the drive could range from gifting it to someone, retrieving and storing some data, as an extra storage space and so on.

Now, the reason for buying the pen drive will give you a fair idea of the kind of pen drive to buy, the volume and what have you.

Obviously, if you’re buying to gift someone, you might want something fancy and based on how much space the person may require, you’d know which drive to buy for them.

The Storage Capacity

Rightly so, the most important thing people look out for when buying a pen drive is the storage capacity.

Let’s be real, you can’t buy a pendrive without knowing its capacity.

What you need the Pendrive for will determine the storage capacity you go for.

If you want to transfer a folder of high-quality movies from one machine to the other, then you’re probably looking at some hundreds of GB.

Presently, there are pen drives which can carry data of up to 1TB. But you have to be careful with the type of pen drive you buy. Especially if it comes with such huge storage capacity.

Brand

There are numerous pen drives on the market presently. Some are original and tend to last longer.

Meanwhile, there are some which are simply ‘Rip-offs’. You buy them and they start messing up in a few weeks.

You can’t even return them to the shop where you bought them because they come with no warranty.

Now, to prevent the frustration which comes with this situation, it’s always best to buy pen drives from brands you know and can trust.

There are quite a good number of known tech brands which deal in the production of pen drives.

You should look out for those brands and purchase their Pendrive. If you see a Pendrive bearing a name you can’t pronounce or a name that is wrongly spelt, you might as well just move away.

You are more likely to face issues with a Pendrive bearing misspelt names than you would with a drive bearing a known name.

That said, you ought to be the judge. To find out which brand you want to buy from.

Conclusion

A pendrive serves different purposes for different people.

However, one thing remains for sure – we all need pen drives at one point or the other.

But acquiring a Pendrive shouldn’t just be as simple as walking into a drinking spot and buying your favourite beer.

There are lots of things you should know and check when buying a Pendrive.

In this article, we spoke about some of these things which should be considered carefully when deciding on buying a Pendrive.

We hope that you found the content of this article very helpful and resourceful.

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