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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

Alec is right about the size.  But man I remember when 1 gig flash drives were way more than I could afford so!!!

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.

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.

Aztec did you make a typo when you said $2799? Because it sounds a little nuts!

How gutted would you be if you lost your $5000 flash drive...

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.

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.

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).

Didn't we say the same thing about space when we had 1 Gb harddrives?

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.