Best place to order branded USB sticks (~500)
 

I'm presenting at a trade show in a couple weeks and would like to get about 500 branded USB sticks before then. In my old life I bought these things 10,000 at a time directly from China.

A few of the quotes I obtained locally were ridiculous and the proofs looked like junk.

Can I talk you out of it? Nobody in the history of trade shows has ever used the flash drives they were handed.

My recommendation - hand out top quality printed cards with a link to your online content.

We stopped doing flash drives years ago, and nobody EVER appeared disappointed. Those that walk the trade show floor asking for your "kit" are just after free flash drives. Save your money!

There is no floor in this instance, it's just for people who attend our training sessions who will need a virtual machine image to follow along. Making them download that over wifi seems like it would be cruel. Our contribution to the swag bag is a little power bar with USB ports.

What is the best way to get a virus ?

put an unknown USB stick in your computer.....

That is how the NSA -CIA_MI5 etc get into a lot of systems, including the Iran nuke plant !

It sounds like the OP has a legit need for USB sticks. They may not be the absolute cheapest, but I've had good luck and quick turn-times with DiscountMugs.com. It looks like you're in the ~$4.50/ea range for 500+, but there are no setup fees and shipping is free.

In the UK I've had several mailings from companies that offer to provide business gifts with our company brand on. In the past few years many of them also say they offer USB sticks along with mugs, scarves, pens etc. Presumably the US will have many more companies that can be googled? go for the biggest who probably has the pull and the stock to sort you out quick.

Don't envy you the task of finding somebody to load what you want on each stick though... unless you can quickly outsource that too.

As the previous poster said, you'll be in the mid $4 range. One tip though; any site that lists their prices can't usually be the cheapest. USB memory prices are set daily by the Chinese vendors, so you'll need to get a quote and work of that. The quotes are usually only valid for 24 hours. Prices go up and down all the time.

For similar projects, we work with Memory Suppliers (memorysuppliers.com). They offer data loading as part of their services. We have worked with them for a number of years: they are reliable and easy to work with.

Ding! We have a winner. In all seriousness, I would setup a local web server and let them download the files.

I was more looking for a personal endorsement, "we used these guys and they were great", most of the samples I obtained were just crap.

Loading is the easy part, we have a machine with 28 USB ports.

I've used FlashBay.com twice and have been happy with the results. We loaded our own pdfs, but they can also preload for you.

What about getting a Wi-Fi enabled file sharing NAS that you can have all of them connect to and download your images? Depending on the number of users, you might need a handful of them, or if you have Wi-Fi at the venue, throw the image on DropBox or some other file sharing site.

Just some ideas.

-Patrick