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

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

Comments

IDE to Compact Flash and More

[MBCook]

After a quick search on google, I found this link. It's an adaptor to let you attach a Compact Flash card to a standard IDE cable (they also have one for 2.5" IDE cables. From my understanding, this should appear as a perfectly normal hard drive to your PC, so you don't need anything odd to boot off it or use it in any other was (as opposed to what you'd have to go through to use a USB Compact Flash adaptor to boot from). This one is about $20, and I know there are others.

Why do flash drives cost so much more? Most likely because they aren't easily found. They're not used much, and I'd assume that most of them have very fast access times (which is what you're paying the most for. Faster chips can be expensive as hell, but I bet there is nothing like being able to saturate your IDE channel with just one drive that you can't even hear). Of course this doesn't make a ton of sense, because to put a gig in a little CF card, the chips have to be incredibly small and dense. To put a gig of memory into something the size of a hard drive wouldn't need very dense or small chips (relitivly) and they could use more chips of lower densities so they should be able to get a decent discount.

My last comment for you is this: the ATA specification is very well documented, and RAM is cheap. If people can interface PIC chips, HC11s, FPGAs, and other things to IDE, they someone could too. I wouldn't be terribly suprised if there was a project out there somewhere (shouldn't be TOO hard to do anyway) to basically turn a bunch of RAM into an IDE drive. Then all you'd need is some sort of battery to keep it going when the PC is off. Plus it'd be easily upgradeable.