In recent years, the price of flash drive is dropping like crazy. I still remember the first time I saw Apacer USB thumb drive back in year 2001, a 128MB drive at USB1.1 wasn’t cheap at all. Back then, the commercial price of a MB flash capacity was more than RM1.
Though not massively affordable, but the vast advantages of USB flash drive out-weight its price tag. Within 2 years beginning from commercial introduction, a lot people are carrying a so called thumb drive/USB drive/pen drive/flash drive on their neck, as if it’s a fashion item.
My first thumb drive was bought in year 2003, and it costs me RM270 for a 256MB Apacher USB2.0 Handy Steno HT202 thumb drive. I still have it with me until today, but the casing is decorated with countless scratches :p This little stick of storage medium has made me started neglecting floppy drive all together.
Due to improvement in production technology and most important the decreasing cost price of flash memory, thumb drive has gotten so much more affordable since the past 1 year. Consumers are forgetting about 256MB; the basic starting-point of consideration for buying a thumb drive is nothing less than 1GB now. I too have joined the wave of buying cheap thumb drive, and I got my 1GB Kingston Data Traveler in Apr 2006 at RM90. At this commercial price, each MB of flash drive is not even more than RM0.09! What a big contrast comparing to 3-4 years back.
Currently, we can even easily get 2GB flash drive within RM100.
All the grandmother-introduction-story written above is only to reflect a point – flash drive is getting very cheap.
But, does it mean that it’s worth buying larger capacity (larger than 2GB) of flash drive for portable storage? In my humble opinion, I definitely don’t think it’s worth investing in more than 2GB of flash drive at this moment.
Yes, I agree that flash drive is cheap and easily portable. But, if you compare the price of a 4GB flash drive to 80GB 2.5” (notebook size) hard disk drive, you will definitely think twice for getting thumb drive larger than 2GB.
The logic is simple. If you can get a 80GB 2.5” hard drive and an enclosure to serve as portable storage within RM280 at this moment, why should you invest more in flash drive? You can’t even get a quarter of 80GB capacity for flash drive within the same price range :)
If you’re thinking of getting larger capacity (larger than 2GB) flash drive to serve as portable storage, my advice is, think twice and compare the value with a portable 2.5” hard drive.