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1.8-inch HDDs still an alternative to flash drives

by on22 July 2009

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Capacities up to 250GB for €140


Yesterday
we wrote about Kingston's 256GB DataTraveller, the biggest USB drive on the market, and as Slobodan pointed out, its massive price tag makes it utterly pointless.

So we checked out an ancient form of storage, tiny hard drives. If you thought 1.8-inch drives were going the way of the Dodo, well they are, but there's still some quite interesting products out there.

Just a few days ago the first listings of Samsung's 250GB 1.8-inch drive tipped up on the interweb, and at €144 it's quite a bargain compared to high end flash drives. The 160GB version is listed at €124, but the drives aren't available just yet. However, you can get a 160GB Toshiba, and it costs €124 as well.

Sure, they're bigger than flash drives, and they're not as shock proof as solid state storage, but the price difference is mind boggling. A 128GB flash drive costs €300, and 256GB will cost you more than twice as much. That's around €2.5 per gigabyte, while a 1.8-inch drive will get you a gig of storage for as little as €0.5.  The difference melts down if you start looking at smaller drives, but still a 64GB flash drive will set you back around €100, which will buy you a 120GB 1.8-incher.

Read here

Kingston rolls out 256GB DataTraveller
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