We load thousands upon thousands of custom flash drives for our customers every month, which many find can be a very beneficial service. And, as a bonus, if your total data size is less than 2GB, there is no additional charge to your preloaded flash drive order! Have your data ready for production, and let us take one more job off our plate.
There are times when it doesn’t make sense to order your flash drives with preloaded data. Perhaps you purchased flash drives for the office or for individual salespeople that load specifically tailored marketing literature that you want to blast out to a group of prospects. The data changes so frequently that it is more helpful to get bulk flash drives without the data being preloaded.
Or, maybe, the data that was loaded at the time of your order needs to be refreshed. You ordered 500 flash drives for a tradeshow or conference, and you have 50 leftover that you would like to repurpose. That’s when you’re faced with the tedious task of duplicating multiple flash drives one at a time. Not a fun task for anyone.
So, how do you copy data to multiple flash drives at one time? Here at EveryUSB, we want to help you do this as painlessly as possible through the methods that we have found to be reliable. Read this post to learn how to make that process much more manageable using a computer running Microsoft Windows.
The Hardware
Use a Reliable USB Hub!
We use professional-grade, multi-target USB duplication hardware in our facilities. It’s expensive machinery! If you have to duplicate data to USB drives as an ongoing office or production task in your location, you may want to consider purchasing a professional duplicator. A duplicator will replace the process outlined below, and it will be faster and more consistently successful. But if you just need to overcome a one-time, rare, or perhaps yearly duplication project, invest in a reliable consumer-grade hub.
Not $10, but not $100 either.
We use a reliable USB hub by Anker to create our masters or run duplication jobs that must be handled by a computer for various reasons. The Anker AH241 USB 3.0 Aluminum 13-Port Hub is just one of many products that could serve you well in this process. We find it to be both durable and reliable. At the time of this writing, the hub is less than $60 and more than capable of reliable connectivity of up to 13 devices at once. Whichever device you decide to purchase, make sure that it is a device that comes with a power supply. Running a very small hub or a hub that does not have its own power supply can cause problems and connectivity issues. You want to avoid connectivity problems that could result in incomplete transfers, errors during transfer, data verification failures, or false verification failures.
The Software
You Can’t Buy It!
Yeah, can you believe it? The best software that we have found to copy data to multiple flash drives at one time is absolutely free! ImageUSB by PassMark Software is a free utility which lets you write an image concurrently to multiple USB Flash Drives. Capable of creating exact bit-level copies of USB Flash Drives, ImageUSB is an extremely effective tool for mass duplication. There are other software titles available both free and for purchase, but ImageUSB has been tested by us for years and it works well.
Before You Begin
Limit the Activity of the Computer that you Intend to Use to Run the Duplication
It’s best not to use the computer for any other purpose during the duplication process. It’s not a requirement, but the fewer tasks your computer is busy working the better. Keep the process nice and clean. Close any and all unnecessary programs including programs that may be running in the background. See: How to stop apps from running in the background on Windows 10.
This tutorial assumes that you are using custom flash drives that are all identical and that they were all ordered from the same batch of flash drives. Using varying sized drives will have varying results and handling them is not covered in this tutorial.
Remove all USB Devices from the Computer.
Especially, storage devices: external hard drives, USB drives that you do not want to be affected and even memory cards. Remove every USB device that can be removed. If you have wireless input device transceivers for a mouse and or a keyboard, that should be fine. But, leaving only USB flash drives plugged into the computer that you would like to have data duplicated onto is the absolute best plan for succeeding in the simplest way.
Let’s Get Started
Using the ImageUSB Software
This is a fairly simple process with a limited number of steps needed to duplicate to all of your intended target flash drives. Let’s look at a quick overview of the simple steps:
Order of Steps
- Install ImageUSB
- Create a master flash drive.
- Create an image of the master that will be saved to a file and used to copy to the remaining flash drives.
- Eject and unplug the master flash drive.
- Insert all of the target flash drives that you would like to be duplicated.
- Write the image to all of the target flash drives with the Post Image Verification option checked.
- Eject all of the drives. Save yourself a lot of time and clicking by using the Windows PowerShell instructions to mass-eject all of the drives at once.
- Repeat steps 5 – 7.
Tutorial Complete
How Do You Copy Data to Multiple Flash Drives at Once? That’s how you do it. I hope you find the article helpful to a very time-consuming issue. Of course, it has taken us years to find all the right tools and knowledge to be able to bring about this comprehensive, step-by-step guide. Please contact Every USB the next time you go to order custom flash drives.