The Scoop on Cheap USB Drives

We are often asked about price matching and once in a while someone asks us to match prices found on eBay and Amazon. These prices are generally unrealistically low, even by direct-from-China standards. So, we decided to investigate and see what kind of product people were receiving when they bought one of these cheap USB Drives.

We found a 1GB Spin drive for $2.05 on Amazon. Spin is considered to be one of the most popular models on the flash market, but $2.05 is way too low. Furthermore, some of the sellers on Amazon had this drive listed for as low as $1.24. Once added to the cart, however, each of these drives came with a hefty shipping cost. The total checkout price of a single 1GB drive was just over $6, regardless of which seller you go with or how many drives we added to the cart. We ended up placing an order for a single Spin drive whose total cost was $6.03 ($1.24 for the drive + $4.79 for shipping).

The drive arrived 5 days later via USPS in a small padded envelope.  Once we received the drive we disassembled it, and tested the quality of the chip.  Our results showed it performed pretty well as you can see below.

The total price of this USB drive after shipping was $6.03.  Although it was a bit more than $1.24, it ended up being a quality drive, and $6 is on par with the average price of other 1 GB USB drives.  The lesson, make sure you check the shipping cost the next time you are comparing prices of USB drives (or anything you buy, really).