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."

1 of 45 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

ram & ide drive by Anonymous Coward · 2002-08-27 01:25 · Score: 0, Offtopic

A couple years ago i wanted to build a hard drive out of the old 4 MB sticks of EDO ram that were pilling up from old machines that had shuffeled off their mortal coil. The idea of a battery to keep the memory when the power was off (like CMOS) seemed to be totally practical.

I'm not an electrical engineer, but there has to be someone out there who can design a PCB (okay, that green board that the cpu & friends sit on) that's along the lines of "fun with electronics" so that people can program and construct the damn things themselves.

i know EDO is a bit out of date now, but with DDR well on its way maybe someone could do it with SDRAM?

And if not, why not?