Flash drive price drop spurring design innovation.

Flash price drop spurring innovation. Flash Drive Direct uses price decline to expand design innovation.
A massive decline in the price of NAND flash memory, the chips that store photos in digital cameras and music in iPods, is prompting design innovation among companies trying to increase sales. At the forefront of this movement for the corporate logo market is design house Flash Drive Direct.
The price of mainstream 2GB SLC (single-level cell) NAND flash memory chips has fallen 73 percent since mid-August to $7.96 late Thursday. The chips hit a high of $18.50 on Aug. 14. The price of 2GB MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash chips have taken a slightly worse dive, 75 percent down to $2.23 on Thursday, compared to its summer high of $8.85 per chip.
A few of the items likely to see more widespread design specialization in gadgets this year include SD (secure digital) cards, USB flash sticks, and internal storage, as well as new, lower-cost SSDs (solid-state disks) in notebook computers.
With the dramatic decrease in flash drive pricing it has allowed corporate and promotional designers Flash Drive Direct to spend more money on unique housing designs and yet still keep within the current price confines of the marketplace.
At the upcoming April 2008 electronics tradeshow in Hong Kong, Flash Drive Direct will be releasing several new designs including a golf bag shaped flash drive, a manila folder shaped drive and a biometric drive in the shape of a well-know secret agents logo.
On the notebook front, Toshiba and Samsung have both developed new 128GB SSDs based in MLC NAND to expand their use in notebook PCs. The new SSDs are less expensive, giving notebook PC designers more choices in storage.
"At 128GB, you're giving consumers the kind of storage space they expect in a notebook," said Jim Elliott, director of flash marketing at Samsung, in an interview.
The new MLC-based drives are an important step forward for SSDs in the battle against hard disk drives (HDD). At 128GB, an SSD stands a far better chance of replacing an HDD in laptop computers because it removes some of the high-capacity advantage HDDs hold.
SSDs have several advantages over HDDs; they're lighter, more rugged, consume less power, make no noise, and enable a computer to start up and load software faster than HDDs. But SSDs are a lot more expensive than HDDs, which is why they're mainly used in the business laptop market, where users are willing to pay more for performance and reliability.
Elliot believes that not only will the marketplace see significant increases in memory at a lower price but an increase in design innovation that will redefine our notion of what a flash drive, notebook or computer will look like.