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Question from Alexandra: “I would like to purchase customized flash drives as an alternative to burning disks for my clients. Can you recommend a good company? Thank you!”
Mary: Flashbay
Melissa: I looked I to that as well but found I would need to purchase 100 of them at $6.00 each so I just give my clients the option of either a cd or flash drive… They usually go for the cd 🙂
Heather: Ditto!!!
Stephanie: Flashbay has a 25 min order requirement. Remember, some computers like MacBooks don’t even have CD drives anymore. I think it’s only a matter of time.
Detta: Commenting just so I can get answers, too.
Tom: I’ve used Pexagon before to order flash drives with my logo printed on them. They have different styles and capacities.
Cate: flash bay
Cristen: I was told that flash drives are not compatible between Mac and PC once you save on one or the other, unless you partition it which limits your space. Something you might want to look into. I would hate to save something from my Mac and then not have clients on a PC be able to open the files!
April: I’d love to know also!
Sarah: I believe the flash drives are readable by any system, it’s just an issue with saving to them. So if you download the files from your Mac onto the drive, a client on a PC can see them and can drag them to their desktop, they just can’t add any new files to the drive without having to reformat it. Or at least that is what I was told…haven’t tested it out yet.
Mary: I just recently switched from PC to a Mac and had to transfer some files using a flash drive. I had no issues reading, viewing, transferring, or adding photos that were taken from the PC over to the Mac. I also just took a photo off my Mac and added it to the flash drive and had no issues. Hope that helps. Thank you for the topic and website suggestions.
Alisa: I’d like to know too…. Had two clients request recently.
Libby: I use them from pexagon.. Own a Mac no problems with compatibility
Laurie: Sandisc makes a FLASH VAULT – pricey, but they looks pretty nice and I hear you can have them engraved.
Arnaud: The only time you will run into issues with cross compatibility would be when you format a drive to something *OTHER THAN* FAT/FAT32. PC’s have a habit of liking and formatting things to NTFS which a mac can read, and if you’d like to write to an NTFS drive then you will want to install some sort of NTFS driver. But either way even an NTFS formatted drive will work on a Mac. And the same goes for a MAC that likes to format things to the HFS file system which can only be read and written too by a Mac unless you have the appropriate drivers and software on a PC.
Either way, for the best cross compatibility you will want to format the drive as a FAT or FAT32 drive depending on the option that shows up.
*Warning* If you require security like encryption, access lists, etc, FAT/FAT32 will not support it directly and as such can be freely accessed by any machine. The only time something is secure is if you use a program to encrypt and/or compress it with a password. *Warning*
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