[The Great RJ]

The real breakthrough is pushing flash drive technology to greater capacities. Hard drives are still mechanical devices and operating at high RPM are subject to serious failure. Solid state flash drives have no moving parts are rugged and use little power. The $60 thumb sized 2GB flash drive around my neck has more storage space than my first two computers combined.

[Young Werther]

The 2GB thumbnail is advertised for $29.95 in today's paper, (probably a mail in rebate).

My first hard drive was a 5MB which came with my Apple III! It was only $4995.00 and came with Advanced Visicalc and an operating system that included a (gulp) tree structured directory!

Ain't Technology wunnerful?

[Calvin Locke]

Yeah, how many times can you write to it, as compared to a hard drive? That is, doesn't the flash memory wear out?

So, writing to it a couple of time a day for a couple of years may be okay, but using it for intensive writing operations may not.