Why haven't Flash Drives replaced CDs?

I know not; I wallow in ignorance, on this point.





David

probably the same companies produce each and they've got a backlog of inventory to get rid of first.

dunno, now computers often come with no cds - the installation and recovery files are in the partition on the hard drive.

and businesses do use flash drives a lot -- if someone is handing me large files with presentations or whatever - it's a flashdrive rather than a cd.

it's funny, my first computer had a 2 gb hard drive and cost about $1200

12 years later i can buy a 2 gb flash drive for about $10

It's probably a cost issue. DVD storage is still very cheap, probably pennies peg gigabyte at production time.

flash drives have gone down tremendously in price and are much easier to reuse. i do see people and businesses switching to them. mine office did almost entirely.

COST...pennies ver dollars

Hi Dag,

Aperson was asking about software distribution specifically:
Flash drives are cost effective for different applications, and the cost is coming down. But for simple distribution of data I'm sure it's cost prohibitive when compared to CD/DVD's.

Yes -- I think you've nailed it.

I know...and I answered that often there are no cds anymore...just a partition drive that has it already loaded in. Then I expanded to other areas.... I simply believe CDs won't be around for much more than maybe a few more years.

DVDs and CDS the same thing as far as most new drives are concern will be around for some time.

A Plastic disk that a laser had burn marks on will always be cheaper then ram memory by a large a very large margin.

Now as far as moving programs around networks up to the internet will always be cheaper then even a bit of plastic and is the wave of the future.

I in fact pick up two things first for my CD/DVD free notebook one was a USB DVD/CD burner and the second was a crossover cable to network my two computers together.

My USB memory cards are not a major way of transfer information between my computers.

Yes, I think maybe in the way of read-only storage devices, CDs or DVDs are probably cheaper than Flash Drives. But is user information stored on CDs, or is it stored on the computer? I don't know.

does the corp selling you a program care about the usability of the method after the program has been transferred to the destination computer? I don't think so....with the cost of making a disk being about a buck and with flash still being a couple of multiples more there is no incentive to go the more expensive route.

also, why take the time and cost to retool the industry to flash drives when digital transfer is increasingly being done via the internet? Hell, even netflix is getting ready for the day when all content is transferred online. You might have heard what has happened to the music industry in the age of i-tunes and file sharing. The industry model of hard copy sales is finished, for music, for movies, and I expect for computer programing as well.

Yes I agree.