Flash or USB drive prices for the most part change on a weekly basis. Why is that?
1. Flash memory is only made by a very few manufacturers such Samsung and Hynix, so they control the prices.
2. Memory chips are in everything: tv’s, i-Pods, cars, stereos, refrigerators, you name it! So the demand is huge and the supply is limited.
3. 80% of the cost of the drive is determined by the cost of the memory chip, so when the price on the chips increase, so does the drive cost.
4. Large buyers like Apple often buy millions of chips at one time, causing an increased demand and lack of supply. So, prices go up.
But consider this, 16 months ago, a 4GB drive cost around $100. Today, the cost is around $20!
And when you consider the fact that it was just a few years ago that a regular 1GB hard drive cost hundreds of dollars, we really have come a long way in a very short time.(Do any of you remember the days in the not so distant past when our computers didn’t even HAVE hard drives? I remember starting out as a graphic designer with my Pagemaker program on one 3.5″ floppy disk and my files on the other. I would have to swap them back and forth when I wanted to save my files! And if you can remember that, you can probably figure out how old I am!!!)
