Flash drives must be getting cheap ...

by Bill Osler Mar 5, 2010 10:18AM PST

I spent the day at a conference in Charlotte today. Instead of giving us the usual printed handouts they gave everybody a 2 GB flash drive with the handouts on the drive. Not that they needed that big a drive.

Most of the rest of the conference was fairly low budget, so either somebody gave the sponsors a bunch of flash drives or the price has gone WAY down. Printing and collating a bunch of handouts isn't exactly free, but it doesn't seem like it would be very expensive.

I'm not complaining at all. I am certainly more likely to find a use for the drive than for a pile of papers.

Discussion is locked

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Yes they are getting cheap

by Mike_Hanks Mar 5, 2010 10:29AM PST

They probably got a great bulk deal on them
Run a virus scan before you use it at home or the office !!!!

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Not that unusual...

by EdHannigan Mar 5, 2010 11:12AM PST

My wife sells computers and software to corporate and institutional clients. We get free flash drives quite often. They are very cheap these days.

The first one I bought years ago was a 256 MB Sandisk Cruzer mini, and I paid $60 for it!

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I still have

by James Denison Mar 5, 2010 1:10PM PST

a 64 MB drive I paid about $30 for a few years ago. Now all it contains is a floppy emulated bootup and some utility files if/when I need them.

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My oldest is a 32mb....

by C1ay Mar 6, 2010 4:52AM PST

I got around 10 years ago for about a $100, the same price I paid last week for a 32GB model; a thousand fold increase in storage for the money in 10 years.

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depreciation worse than automobiles

by James Denison Mar 6, 2010 6:45AM PST

And that's for something that works as well as it did when bought. That would be like a $20,000 car being worth only $20 ten years down the road. Even smashed up it would bring more than that for scrap metal. Also the new drives have much faster flash memory in them.

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Promos

by Willy Mar 5, 2010 11:32AM PST

I've seen some ads in the trade papers where you can buy flash drives, put your logo on it and then I guess hand them out, etc. to promote whatever. Of course the less storage, the cheaper they are and it makes an impact. Well, its batter than a keychain and some do come in keyring, LED light, golf ball, letter opener, you name it, probably a chance it'll be available or offered.

I remember some yrs. back my boss gave me a 16mb flash drive. I thought, I hit the jackpot. It lasted only a few weeks, it was given back to calm a peeved customer for the boss's sake(not me), I later got a replacement and free lunch(I think). I already had the co. car. -----Willy

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this week's special

by James Denison Mar 5, 2010 1:08PM PST

at our local Staples is a 4GB PNY attache type flash drive (my preference) for under $10. Sale starts sunday and I plan to pick up a couple since I also needed CD-R discs which are also on sale.

Another thing I do is buy flash chips for cameras and use in pocket sized readers since they are dual purpose, both for camera and for other data.

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We got one when we bought a mattress set last year

by Steven Haninger Mar 5, 2010 7:20PM PST

It was of rather small capacity and set up to autorun and connect to the manufacturer's web site for such as warranty information, etc. I tossed it. I should have kept it as I've since learned how to format and make these things bootable to do such as BIOS updates and run other DOS type utilities. We've gotten them with a couple of software purchases. The first one I bought for my wife was a Sandisk 1gb a few years back. I waited for the price to drop below 100 bucks before buying. This capacity and more is what the free ones can come with.

Flash drives must be getting cheap ...

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