For the first time in a long time, I did not go crazy on Boxing Day (Week) sales. There was no parking in front of Staples at 5:30 a.m., no freezing outside for an hour in hopes of getting an insanely cheap laptop like in previous years.
Part of that was due to the fact I've got most of what I need from the big Boxing Day discounters, and what's left on my list doesn't go on sale like that. But that didn't stop me from picking up a few things.
While grabbing yet another external hard drive (my eighth, I think) and some tax software, I also picked up a few USB flash memory drives. They were on sale for half off, so I picked up two eight-gigabyte thumb drives for $8 each.
Wow, I thought to myself. My first flash memory card, a Delkin 512 megabyte (half a gigabyte) cost me $273 in 2003. I did all my photography on that one card for several years. In a mere 8.5 years, the cost of flash memory had dropped from $546 per gigabyte to a dollar.
While it is a general trend, not all memory has dropped in price. Hard drives have nearly doubled in recent months. Massive flooding in Thailand hit several strategically important high tech businesses, including many hard drive manufacturers, that were concentrated in the same industrial parks. A two-terabyte Western Digital external drive is now regularly priced at $229. Not too long ago, they were about half that, at least on sale.
Flash memory's tremendous drop in price also goes a long way in padding Apple's pockets. Apple differentiates its models by memory capacity. An iPhone 4S, purchased directly from Apple, is $649 for a 16 GB version, while a 32 GB is $749 and a 64 GB is $849. As we've seen with my Boxing Week purchase, if you can get flash memory, perhaps not of the same spec, but in similar quantity, for a buck a gigabyte, $200 for a 48 gigabyte difference is a lot of money these days.
Flash memory is incredibly durable. There was a report in late 2011 that a diver near Vancouver found a Canon 1000D DSLR underwater. He pulled out the memory card, plugged it into a computer, and the images were still there. Using Google+, he was able to track down the owner within a day.
Flash memory is a form of solid-state memory. Essentially, the data is stored on non-moving silicon chips, not platters of disks whirring at 7200 rpm while the magnetic ones and zeros are written to and read from. As seen from the diving example, it's a pretty stable form of storage. How it pans out long term is an open question.
Apple's MacBook Air pioneered using flash memory as a replacement for a hard drive, using what's called an SSD, or solid state drive. These are still incredibly pricy, and not large by hard drive standards (about the size of what would have been common about eight years ago), but they have potential. And they are lightning quick. I'd love to add one to my photo editing computer just to speed up the editing process.
As the price continues to plummet, flash memory will soon replace hard drives all over the place. iPods were among the first devices to ditch a spinning disk for a chip, and it is far from the last. Five years from now, my kids will be asking me, "Dad, what's a hard drive?"
"It's that loud, noisy thing that my computer used to have," I'll tell them.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
