USB Flash Memory Prices still falling

Flash Memory Prices Fall Again

Another tangible sign that solid state memory prices are dropping: a 64GB USB 3 Flash Drive for £25

Sometimes you see a price drop that makes your jaw drop. And there are some products where this happens more often than others. You can easily figure out which ones are the biggest droppers with a quick thought experiment: Just imagine you're in the distribution business. Which product would you least like to have a warehouse full of? In all likelihood, the answer is going to be USB Memory Sticks.

Anyone involved in digital media tends to think in terms of how much audio or video you can fit into a given amount of storage. For example, you can fit three and a quarter hours of mono CD-quality audio in a gigabyte. Let's say that that's an hour and a half of stereo. you could back that up on a 1GB USB stick

How much cheaper?

Ten years ago, you would have to pay around £385 for that. Today, it's around 900 times cheaper. There's a UK company advertising a 64GB stick for only £25.

Of course, this isn't going to be fast memory - (but it is a fast interface - it's USB3). But as an extra backup that you can put on your keyring, you can hardly complain. Even if you need 16 of them to make a terabyte, which would cost only £400.

Meanwhile, video data requirements are shooting up as well, as we explained here.

Non-technical people tend to get a bit blasé about how it is now possible to store multiple HD feature films on things that you can lose in your pocket, but the reality is quite astonishing. Ten years ago, the idea that you might be able to back up an entire video project on something costing £25, and that you could accidentally drop in your cup of decaff latte would have seemed completely wild. In fact, if you'd dropped the decade-old equivalent on your coffee mug, it would have smashed it and the table as well.