$4,357 – 64GB Flash Drive – Someone Please Explain Why?

Cruising through Amazon several days ago my buddy from New York, who runs this talented design firm, came across a 64GB flash drive to the price tag of $4,357. He immediately shot me an email. Why? is all he typed…

I didn’t have a good answer for him. Sure portability is something you can’t put a price tag on, but there is a point of diminishing returns where this just doesn’t make sense. First off, the delta on price points between the 64GB flash drive and say a 120GB Western Digital Passport ($89) is $4,268.

So other than the fact of extreme price differences lets look at some other factors.You might not know this, but the average life cycle of a flash drive isn’t that great so it’s not the best choice for long term storage. Especially at +$4 grand. Next, consider the size. The example Western Digital Passport is about the size of my wallet. 5.3 inches long and 3.5 inches wide. That’s portable enough for anyone. Although the Busdrive (64GB) is smaller, it’s not so impressive for a “must have” gadget.

Now consider this, lets take the $4,357 and sink it into some WD Passports, what do you end up with? Oh… about 5.8Terabytes of data storage. Of course your office space would look ridiculous (something like this), so buying one mini hard drive at double the capacity of a Busdrive is a very obvious choice. Other than making an extreme tech-geek argument on size verse MB what’s the point?