Why is some flash memory so expensive?

I was looking at flash memory yesterday and was fascinated by the differing price between different flash technologies, for instance if you were to purchase a 32GB Compact Flash card, which at the time of writing is around £140 for a Sandisk branded one, yet you can get a 32GB OCZ USB flash drive for £60 or even a 64GB one for £110!I seriously doubt it’s because of the performance, there probably both roughly the same, I also doubt that it’s a physical size issue as if you’ve ever opened up a USB flash drive you will find the flash memory is smaller then a compact flash card anyway.

Is it supply and demand? Maybe, I can only speculate, but I can’t imagine the demand for large USB flash drives being as high as the demand for large Compact Flash cards that are used all around the world by professional photographers and video production companies alike.

So why do large capacity Compact Flash cards seem so behind USB Flash memory?

Western Digital Announce 2TB Drive

Ok so just 12 days after blogging about the reliability of the Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB drive (which can be found here), Western Digital have announced their new 2TB Caviar Green drive. You can find a pretty extensive review / preview of it here at RegHardware.

I’ve had some bad experience with Western Digital in the past, but when this drive gets released at a sensible price, I may just give them another try! There has also been issues in the past with putting WD Green drives into large RAID arrays on certain controllers so it will be interesting to see if the same problems crop up with this drive.

What does the future hold for backups?

Well that’s an easy question; the answer is obviously online backup services. Or is it? With the current upload speeds on home cable & ADSL broadband connections online backup services are only practical if your producing lets say 10 – 30GB of data per month. But what about for those who are constantly generating in the region of 100GB+ per month?

I personally have 2TB of storage on various hard drives and my file server, which is constantly full, and also constantly changing. Unfortunately I’m on ADSL with just 256kbps of upload bandwidth, and to upload the current 2TB would take approximately 26 months, by which time I’d probably have easily generated another 2TB of content! So online backup in my case is just not an option. So what about external hard drives? Well to me, an external hard drive just isn’t a backup; it’s too easy to damage the drive when the time comes that you actually need it, for example dropping it.

Of course, CD / DVD / Blu-Ray and USB flash drives are out of the question either because of the quantity required or the price. So what do I use? Call me old fashioned but I’m using a SCSI LTO 1 tape drive, it was cheap (second hand) its reasonably fast at 15MB a second and each tape can hold 100GB (200GB compressed) I just simply span the data over multiple tapes. Obviously I could get an LTO4 drive which can store 800/1600GB but it also costs a lot more.

The day that online backup becomes convenient for everybody will be the day the ISP’s introduce broadband packages with a decent upload, which I don’t see happening in the UK for a long time!

Can hard drives reliably go above 1TB?

I consider Seagate to be the leading brand when it comes to hard drives, back in August 2008 when Seagate was first to roll out 1.5TB hard drives, I was expecting the likes of Western Digital and Samsung to soon follow. To this day (almost 6 months later) the only 1.5TB drive on the market is the very same Seagate drive.

The drive model is ST31500341AS, and if you search for reviews on it, there are very mixed feelings about this drive,  for instance if you look at the reviews here at Dabs.com you’ll see exactly what I mean. Seagate have also revised their 5 year warranty to 3 years to “better reflect current industry standards” Is this because of this very exact drive by any chance?

The fact that every other manufacturer seems 6 months behind Seagate really begs the question, were Seagate too optimistic with the design of this 1.5TB drive? Or did they just rush it out to beat the competition?

I was really looking forward to using this drive back in August, but for now I’m going to stick with 1TB enterprise class drives.

Still No Perfect Home NAS Solution?

For the past couple of years I have been expecting the likes of Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, Icy Box etc to come out with a reasonably priced 4 drive network attached storage enclosure that actually has what people want in home NAS, it still hasn’t happened yet and it mystifies me as to why, there’s definitely a market for it.

The essential features I would want in the ideal home NAS would be:

•4 SATA drive bays

•Gigabit networking

•RAID 0, 1 & 5 as well as JBOD Support

•FAT, NTFS & EXT2/3 File System

•Friendly user interface

•Supplied without drives!

•Priced below £200, preferably around £150

Any option’s that I can find that even come close to them requirements are above the £300 mark, which is just over priced considering you can pretty much build one for half that using standard desktop PC components and an open source NAS OS such as FreeNAS.