[rant]

So a 4GB thumb drive sells for $70 or less, yet an IDE 16GB 2.5" form Flash Drive sells for in excess of $1000.

[/rant]

Isn't there some kind of crazy speed difference between the flash chips used in each? I don't know if that's responsible for the full price difference, but surely those are different chips used in the drive than in the thing that's going to be constrained by the USB.

This reminds me of the old joke about a woman buying brians. She can have some university professor brian for $300/ounce, some nerosurgeon brian for $400/ounce, Nobel laureate brain is $600/ounce, or politician brain for $6000/ounce.

Spoiler:
Qb lbh xabj ubj znal cbyvgvpvnaf vg gnxrf gb trg na bhapr bs oenvaf?!?!?

Keep in mind that costs scale non-linearly. a 16GB CompactFlash card is $600 from several different vendors. Of course, in an IDE form factor you've got more physical room, but how much you want to bet that they use an off-the-shelf memory chip (or chips) and bolt on some sort of IDE compatibility chip?

Very cheap high-density flash is probably MLC (multi-level cell), some versions of which are quite unreliable: even reading one sector can corrupt others (though there are various ECC schemes to mitigate this "read disturbance"). Anyone producing flash drives in an IDE form-factor is probably aiming them at people who expect reliability and bit-error rates closer to those of traditional hard-drives; such devices will use SLC (single-level cell) flash.

Having said that, the price difference between MLC and SLC isn't itself enough to account for the $70/$1000 disparity, especially as 16GB in 2.5in isn't at all a high-density application.

Peter

Well, the price of flash has fallen precipitously in the last few months. It wasn't that long ago that a 4GB card costs two hundred bucks, thus justifying the price of the hard drive.

Matthew

Basically I'm kind of hoping that such drives will have a price drop before ide is completely obsolete. A 16 or 20 gig 2.5" flash drive would be quite neat to put in my PJB-100.