Technology signposts

A few quick items worth noting, not necessarily all connected:

  • Last month, Toshiba introduced its first Blu-ray Disc player…and some months ago stopped pretending that its upscaling DVD player was “almost as good as” BD. This is a signpost comparable to Sony’s first VHS recorder…
  • On Black Friday, you can buy a Blu-ray player for less than $80 (from Target or another chain that shall go unmentioned)–or a name-brand Blu-ray player for less than $100 (LG, from Amazon). And Blu-ray movies are showing up for $10 or less…
  • Also on Black Friday, you can get flash drives for $2 a gigabyte (in 16gb and 32gb sizes, sometimes in 8gb sizes)…
  • But, just to keep making life difficult, you can also buy hard disks for less than seven cents a gigabyte: $60 for a 1Terabyte USB-powered external drive (Western Digital, but admittedly 5,400RPM, again at Target) or $90-$100 for 1.5TB internal drives, $130 for 2TB internal drives (also name brand, 7200RPM).

What you can’t do, as usual: Buy a seven cent/1GB or $7/100GB hard drive (except as some kind of fluke old-hardware closeout) or a $2/1GB flash drive.

Admission: This is a postdated post. We host our family on Friday this year–16 in all–so I’m highly unlikely to be on the computer “today” as this appears.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 11:40 am and is filed under Technology and software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Technology signposts”

  1. Seth Finkelstein says:
    November 28, 2009 at 4:48 pm

    Like eggs, donuts, and cookies, deciterabytes are cheaper by the dozen.

  2. walt says:
    November 28, 2009 at 4:58 pm

    True enough–and, like eggs, there are typically lower limits on how much/many you can buy. (I’m guessing it’s hard to locate a new 50GB hard disk, for example…or a 50MB flash drive.)

    Hmm. Just did a little searching, and you can buy a 40GB external hard disk–for $65. Why you would want to, I’m not quite sure…

  3. Jeff Scott says:
    November 30, 2009 at 11:43 am

    There are always libraries who buy flash drives in bulk and sell the 1gb flash drive for that cheap or cheaper.

  4. walt says:
    November 30, 2009 at 1:46 pm

    Jeff: Really? I didn’t think you could buy $2 1GB drives–when I look at bulk-purchase sites, I’m not seeing prices anywhere near that. I stand corrected–but I’m seeing prices (at library web sites) like $8 for 1GB drives or $10 for 2GB, not $2 for 1GB. Could you point me to an example of a library selling $2 1GB flash drives?