Gaming World Forums
General Category => Entertainment and Media => Topic started by: Dale Gobbler on July 18, 2008, 07:41:43 pm
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Man flash drives just keep increasing in the amount of stuff they can store. The highest I've seen for sale is a 32 gig flash drive for $99. 32 GIGS! thats like a less than decent sized hardrive. Soon we'll see flash drives that can store in the hundreds of gigs. Will flash drives become the dominant portable storage device and make CDs/DVDs obsolete? I think in the near future we will have more and more USB compatible electronics. Maybe the future next gen gaming consoles will add USB support for flash drives, and maybe more games/programs will be sold on flash drives. I have seen programs, like TaxCut sold in stores on 1 gig flash drives for around the same price as TaxCut sold on CD. Are we moving towards a more standalone device driven market? Will CDs/DVDs go the way of betamax in the near future?
pips.
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Well there's still a long way for flash drives to overtake discs but you can expect them to take over traditional hard drives in near future.
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pretty much everything from cellphones to vidya consoles has a fucking usb drive and those things are faster than conventional cd's but they're still pretty expensive. i don't know the facts and figures but printing data to a 50gb blu-ray is only like a dollar per disc or something.
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I don't understand how bands release their stuff on USB drive
is it just that they don't know what the hell they're doing and wasting a lot of money or
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a lot of bands have been doing that for like promotional purposes or including it with their LIMITED EDITIONS or something, but I haven't seen any bands releasing only on some sort of special flash drive. It seems like it would be a rather inefficient way. However, included as a bundle with a limited edition or used for promotional purposes, the incentive of getting a free flash drive with it is enough to make people pay more for it (as you usually pay more for the limited/special edition of albums anyway)
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Drug companies give away flash drives all the time. Apparently they come with those information packets about their drug (those long sheets of paper that usually come with the drug itself), but I just erase them and have a babillion free lipitor and such flash drives. They all look exactly the same too just different labels, it's pretty great.
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Drug companies give away flash drives all the time. Apparently they come with those information packets about their drug (those long sheets of paper that usually come with the drug itself), but I just erase them and have a babillion free lipitor and such flash drives. They all look exactly the same too just different labels, it's pretty great.
haha, this is pretty cool. what's the capacity like?
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usually 512mb-1gb for the free ones. And flash drives will probably never overtake discs. Flash drives are more efficient to use but discs are faster to press and also continuously getting cheaper.
Also:
Well there's still a long way for flash drives to overtake discs but you can expect them to take over traditional hard drives in near future.
This is still a long way off, actually (in computer ages at least), solid state drives are still ridiculously expensive (although way more stable and faster) than traditional hard drives. A SSD costs about 3.50 USD per gigabyte of data and are up to 256gb in size (which would be almost $900), while an HDD currently costs about 40 cents per gigabyte and can reach into terabytes of data. They also wear out after so many writes to them. Basically, at this point, if anyone recommends a SSD, they're recommending a 32gb one for your Operating System only.
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Alec is right about the size. But man I remember when 1 gig flash drives were way more than I could afford so!!!
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pretty nuts the way they're going! couple of years ago I paid heaps for 512mb (may have only been 128 actually) and now they cost nothing. my 2gb one is fine for me now (won't need much more until later) and I think I paid less for it.
hell, my coworker bought an external hard drive for work the other day. it's 1 terabye and it was remarkably well-priced.
so I can see em going pretty well for while and I like flash drives a lot more than any other devices. I don't know about gaming and other programs though--it'd be cool, but it seems easier to just run that sort of thing of discs.
music sold on flash drives is a cool promo thing (NIN did it, and I think the Mars Volta are doing it) but it'll probably stay at that.
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oh, hold on i left my terabyte hardrive in my other pants. Hahaha that'll be the day. Also 40 cents per gig for hdd is extremely overpriced (hell terabyte hdds are goin' for around 16-17 cents a gig). I got my 320 gig sata hdd for 15 cents a gig. Man discs are too bulky and too easily damaged. They are also progressing slowly in terms of size. From 700mb cds to 4 gig dvds to like 50 gig blurays. I google searched and found a 64 gig flash drive for only $2799 (USD). I can totally see people using flash drives as hardrives. Also flash drives are faster at data transfer and easier to use than discs.
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Only? Why the hell would somebody pay that when they could get a 300gig external hard drive for like $120?
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Aztec did you make a typo when you said $2799? Because it sounds a little nuts!
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Kanguru's 64GB Flash Drive Max, only $2,800
Most of them are $5,000, by the way.
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How gutted would you be if you lost your $5000 flash drive...
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I think flash drives and discs should be considered in different classes because discs are mainly written once and used to store data for a long time and flash drives and rewritten almost every time you use them. As long as you physically protect a disc the data will last 50+ years. Flash drives on the other hand have limited number of read write cycles and tend to go bad in 1 to 3 years if you use them on a regular basis. Hard drives really don't have this problem, the parts just fail (after 5 to 6 years generally) but the data is not lost unless the platter gets demagnetized.
I know companies like sandisc are trying to make flash drives that you write once and they keep for long time, but they are expensive.
this is actually one of the reasons that would prevent me from buying a laptop with a solid state drive. Operating systems do a lot of miniature reads and writes continually, so you can imagine the kind of wear it puts on those things. So one day all your data is just going to get corrupt.
Also I think that companies are handing out stuff on flash drive with hopes that you will find it useful, and start using it on a regular basis. Then it becomes free advertising for them because their logo is all over it. I am sure it costs like 40 cents to produce a 256mb drive in china.
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Yeah...we'll have 37 Tb harddrives by 2010 anyway.
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/8350/52/
While flash drives and solid state drives have many advantages, it's hard to beat the massive storage capacities and cheapness of disk drives.
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Sure hard disks have lots and lots of space but do we really need that much space? I can understand webhosts and corporate backups requiring lots of space but for normal home use even 1 TB is a lot (unless you're one of those dirty pirates who must pirate everything they see and store them for some unknown reason).
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Didn't we say the same thing about space when we had 1 Gb harddrives?
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No idea but capacity isn't everything. By the time games or videos or whatever are taking 1 TB by themselves flash drives propably have similiar capacity with superior performance and price.
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But HDDs will probably still be bigger. And a lot of games can take up anywhere from 1-5 gigabytes by themselves (most games take up at least 1 gigabyte), plus any kind of editing software will take up a lot of space, and for people who do video and audio editing, a terabyte isn't all that big. Plus, 3 CDs to me when I rip is roughly a gigabyte. A lot of people legitimately buy a lot of CDs and music, and that ADDS UP (especially to certain audiophiles that rip in lossless formats and convert for portable listening). Oh and anyone who owns an Ipod probably has two copies of every song anyway because they've got the AAC files too. Especially if you don't ever like to delete anything (READ: ME. My hard drive would be full if it weren't for the accidental format thing, and I still really need a new one). Currently, a terabyte of space is necessary for a lot of people.
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Actually, flash drives are about to get a major step up in longevity: Japanese Scientists Invent Durable Flash Memory Which Can Last 100 Years (http://www.dailytech.com/Japanese+Scientists+Invent+Durable+Flash+Memory+Which+Can+Last+100+Years/article12395.htm)
I'd agree that CDs/DVDs are not going away anytime soon due to their ultracheap manufacturing, but this technology could definitely help flash memory get the jump on hard drives.
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[quote ]oh, hold on i left my terabyte hardrive in my other pants. Hahaha that'll be the day.[/quote]
I actually know someone who carried a 500 gb HDD with them between school and home, that hooked up like a flash drive (it plugged in via USB, but needed to be plugged into an outlet). I have no idea where they got it, but they dropped it in class and it was the best day ever.
Also, since I'm buying a new computer, I'm reminiscing about my old computer, and some of the past parts its had. I still remember back when my brother said he'd never fill a 1 gig hard drive.
I can actually see flash drives getting much bigger and less expensive, but I don't really think that they'll take over traditional HDD's. DVD's... maybe (and probably just games too...), but then again that's bases on nothing but personal knowledge of this shit, so really, there is absolutely NO basis to it.
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Didn't we say the same thing about space when we had 1 Gb harddrives?
I remember when my brother got this HUGE 5GB Harddrive, and I couldn't even fathom how it would be possible to fill it up