Good Things Come in Small Packages

USB Flash Drives

I bought a new 1GB USB Flash Drive yesterday for US $15.95.  I already had a 64MB Flash Drive that I got with my laptop in 2003.  I don’t recall exactly how much I paid for the 64MB drive, but I know it was a bit more than $15.95.  

So, I sat down and did some math.  Assuming the best case (i.e, that I paid $15.95 each for both drives), the cost per MB at the time I purchased them was:

  • 2003 – $0.250
  • 2006 – $0.016

On the surface, the $0.016 per MB may appear to be quite inexpensive. However, you can get a 160GB hard drive these days for $100.00 or less, which puts the cost per MB in the neighborhood of $0.0006.

So it appears that the cost of “no moving parts” flash memory has quite a ways to go before it becomes cost-competitive with rotating disk storage.  Or maybe it never will.  Wonder what the chances are that both flash and rotating disk storage will be rendered obsolete by some other yet to be discovered technology?

What do you think?