[deadeye39]

Some time ago (a year/less or so) I bought a Lacie 8gb usb hard disk drive for £70.

Its about the size of a credit card and 3mm thick. I now see flash USB sticks of the same size - 8gb maximum usually - for under £40. Is it simply the time difference and the prices have fallen or is RAM in some way worse than hard disks. (My last USB stick was RAM and corrupted all my data hence why I bought HDD)

Should I have just bought a normal USB Stick?

[Dave Hybrid]

Technology gets cheaper as time goes on...

[samjohnson]

Yup as time goes on things go down in price. Last year in may I had gotten a 1gig usb stick for $30. By september or so it was down to $10. It just how it goes. So no you didn't get ripped off.

[spot]

It's a shame about equipment dropping in value in some ways or I'd have a 6GB SCSI raid array worth £12,000 instead of using it as a bedside table.

[SocialWarfare]

Nope, its just the way things go with technology, as time goes by prices obviously change

[alex]

Flash memory was notoriously expensive for a long time hence early mp3 players either having hardly any capacity (if flash) or being Mini hdd CF based or 1.5" hdd based.

As everyone else has said; prices fall over time. This is mainly due to demand. The more demand the more a manufacturer can refine their manufacturing processes which reduces cost to the consumer at the back end.

It won't be long before solid-state (flash) hdd's become mainstream. Samsung, for instance, are already releasing a new version of their flash hdd 32gb.

Flash generally has the advantage of allowing much higher read times than a 'standard' hdd but write times are, so far, nothing to write home about.

[deadeye39]

Eh. Looks like soon I will have to replace my Raptor