Flash drives keep on getting bigger and bigger. In the early days, we dealt with 8mb, 16mb, 32mb and larger versions, until we got to 512mb, 1Gb, 2Gb and larger. Now a 32Gb model has finally landed, but what an amazingly expensive price!

Yes, that’s US $1499 for 32Gb of Flash drive memory. Of course, by Christmas we’ll probably have 64Gb and maybe even 128Gb flash drives to play with, hopefully at prices better than this.

As with all new technologies, they’re expensive at first, but soon they come down in price. Probably by Christmas 2008, flash drives in computers will really start replacing hard drives in larger numbers. We’re already seeing Samsung and Seagate make moves to include at least 1Gb of flash memory in upcoming hard drives so that they run faster - using the 1Gb as a cache area for often-accessed files.

Samsung and Fujitsu are also shipping very selected models of notebook computer with flash hard drives already. But at the price, they’re clearly still more expensive than their hard drive brethren.

You do get longer battery life by using a flash drive, but flash drives also have a problem with read/write cycles. Depending on the drive, they can stop working (i.e. no reading or writing) from 10,000 to 100,000 cycles - it all really depends on the quality of memory used to manufacture the drive.

While this is a problem, with some people discovering their memory cards and flash drives no longer work, flash manufacturers are working on ways to mitigate this problem in the future. Until then, flash strikes yet another blow to hard drive technology, although hard drives still hold the upper hand in pure storage space, with the 750Gb hard drive from Seagate available to purchase for at least two or three months already.

The future sure is looking flashy!

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