What Is a Masked USB Flash Drive?

Promotional USB flash drives are incredibly popular at the moment with lots of companies buying them to promote their brand, to support their sales activities or to hand out at seminars or conferences with presentations pre-loaded onto them.
As the market for promotional USB flash drives continues to grow it is starting to attract an increasing number of suppliers looking to cash in and make a quick buck. The challenge for the buyer of any promotional USB sticks (and equally the opportunity for the scam merchants) is to be sure they are getting exactly what they are being quoted for.
If for example you place an order for 500 x 1GB USB flash drives printed with your company logo on both sides then its reasonable to expect that this is what will be supplied. The difficulty is that on the surface all drives, regardless of memory size look the same, a 1GB version looks just like a 16GB version so how do you check to make sure you've been supplied with what you've ordered?
A supplier that is selling masked drives (knowingly or unknowingly) will typically still describe them as Grade A drives (when they're clearly not) and will put just as much effort into the overall look and feel of the drive. In other words when they arrive your printed USB Flash Drives are likely to look great, they might come with a lanyard and a giftbox and they might even be pre-loaded with data but a large part of what you're paying for is the internal memory and NOT the appearance of the drive or any accessories.
It's not as simple as just plugging the USB stick in and checking the "properties" of the flash drive on your PC. A "masked" flash drive will show up as a 1Gb or whatever size you've ordered, hence the expression "masked"
To check that you have not been duped and sold "masked" flash drives you should make the following checks when they arrive:
Let's assume you've ordered 1GB USB drives then.....

Connect the USB stick to your PC and wait for it to be allocated a drive letter.
Transfer files (data) exceeding 900 MB (just below 1GB) to the USB drive - it might take a couple of minutes.
When the data has transferred onto the flash drive then "safely remove the USB flash" drive from your PC
Find another PC and connect the same flash drive to it and check to see if all of the files you loaded show up. If they don't and say only 50% appear then you've been sold masked flash drives.
If your masked USB drives were purchased from a UK supplier then you should (assuming they are still in business) have recourse to them but if you've purchased them from outside your country of domicile it could be more challenging getting recourse.
Whilst it might often seem more attractive to buy from cheaper suppliers overseas it is not without risk and our advice is to buy local - you then know you're covered by your local laws and terms of trade.