Generally speaking when we talk about external hard drives, there is not as much to talk about these days compared to a few years ago when they were all the rage. Flash storage has been getting more and more popular with many users, simply due to the fact that it is more compact, offers faster transfer speeds and more recently they are starting to offer higher capacities. They do have a slight downside however and this is the relative cost. On the lower end of the scale, any flash drive up to around 16GB in capacity is easy to get hold of – almost to the point where people are literally giving them away. When we start to move up the scale to drives that offer 32GB and above, the performance of the drive also starts to go up and in turn so does the cost. With the average size of files quickly growing and the need to carry more and more data around with us also growing, flash storage quickly becomes an expensive solution. This is where the good ol’ trusty hard drive comes back in to place. With the price of hard drives coming down to almost rock bottom prices and to a point where they are inexpensive option for a number of people, we find these legacy storage options holding on to a strong position in the market due to their cheaper cost for a higher capacity. Naturally we don’t expect these legacy drives to offer the same blazing fast speeds that flash storage has to offer, but instead the amount of data that they hold is the desirable feature.



Link: eTeknix