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Why Do Flash Drives Cost So Much?
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
From what I've seen , and what the guys at wearables it is indeed possible to construct a low power pc that boots off a PCMCIA (adapted CF) card.
Although their end goals are not identical as yours, their immediate needs (low power) are the same.
Why does nobody make one with a write-protect switch???
They would be perfect for storing Tripwire databases, read-only boot partitions, etc. I've looked all over, though, and as far as I can tell, all of them are permanently read/write.
The wearing out part is overestimated usually. I know that this is a concern sometimes for people using handhelds to do odd things (you'd be amazed what you can do with Linux on an iPaq), and someone was concerned about wearing out their flash.
Someone calculated that if you flash the flash in the iPaq as fast as possible, in a well distributed pattern (which CF cards do for you usually), it would take 12 YEARS to wear out a 32MB unit.
12 years is an awful long time. In 12 years your wimpy 512MB-2GB flash drive will look like NOTHING (think about the old 120MB hard drives, I had one of those in my comp 12 years ago and now they're totally worthless).
Pcengines is where I've purchased my adaptors. I use them with cheap 8meg cards to boot previously floppy based computers and my tech support problems decreased quite a bit.
The compactflash spec includes an ATA emulation built into the CF storage card - they look exactly like hard drives to the computer. There's little or no buffering, but they are generally faster than hard drives and much faster than floppies. They only manage a palty 1 million writes, though, so don't use them for swap or frequently changed files systems.
-Adam