Why Do Flash Drives Cost So Much?

Posted by Cliff on Monday August 26, 2002 @11:08AM from the lessons-in-hardware-economics dept.

Alvin Pettit asks: "I wanted to get a Flash drive for my PC for the following reasons: it is quiet, I can save electricity and I don't have to worry about moving parts. When I looked for these drives I found them to be rather expensive, much more so than the smaller devices such as CompactFlash! Why do Flash drives cost so much more than CompactFlash devices?"

"I looked up IDE flash drives compared to compact flash and this is what I found:

On pricegrabber:
SanDisk Part# SD25B880402 880MB IDE 2.5 FLASHDRIVE is $1148.00
This comes out to about $1.30 per meg
Where a compact flash is
SanDisk Part# SDCFB1000768 1 GB COMPACTFLASH CARD is $589.00
This comes out to about $.60 per meg
Even Ultra Compact flash is cheaper:
SanDisk Part# SDCFH512784 512MB COMPACT FLASH ULTRA is $268.00
This comes out to about $.52 per meg

Has anyone adapted compact flash drives to be used as bootable drives on PCs. I want to make a nice low powered quiet PC."

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Why Do Flash Drives Cost So Much?

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