Prophet, re: "if I could buy a card for $10 which could hold 10 hours of music ..." You can buy such a "card" today for far less. It's called a CD.
CD-Recordable drives have reached the point where they can cut an entire CD in under 10 minutes on "8X" media. Super-high-quality Ricoh CDs cost about $1.25 and have a 90%+ success rate during the recording process (my own experience is that the rate approaches 100%).
Personally, I think that Flash won't have a competitive edge for "big jobs" until it gets down to 0.18u or below. At that point it will still cost more for flash but the advantages of size, durability and convenience will outweigh the extra cost. Until then, it's hard to argue with using CDs for PC back-up as well as recording music.
Anyone interested is advised to check out the HP and Plextor product lines. Their IDE drives replace you existing CD-reader for a bit more than $200.
For recordable CDs at the right price, check out cdrexpress.com
For stock in a really terrific semi company in whom I am long, contact sandisk.com :-)
Craig
PS On my personal PC, I have both a 20GB tape backup and an HP CD-RW drive. With all the files I keep handy, it takes ~3 hours to back up the entire drive to tape (even at 100MB per minute!) The "clickety, clitety, whoosh" tape noise is too much for light sleepers so I rarely get a "round tuit".
But so little of this data changes that I can make CD-RW backups of all changes in ~30 minutes using $4 CD-RW media. Every so often, I pop in 8X CDR media and make a backup that ANYONE can read in most any PC. It's a comforting feeling to know that my hard drive can make a sound like "BLAM! ... tick, tick, tick" and I still won't be out in the cold. |
