16GB flash drive costs $400 to make

THERE HAS BEEN a lot of reaction from our readers when it comes to wishes about flash memory. Most of you guys are wishing for a 40 gig hard drive for around 100 dollars, but that time is still a fair way away.

However, the truth is rather disturbing, at least for now. We have talked with several engineers that are working on SSDs and we have been told that approximately, one 16GB SSD has a manufacturing price of $400 - amounting to around 25 dollars per gigabyte. The price of a "classical" hard drive is just beyond any comparison, since we're talking about a little under two dollars per GB.

However, our two sources expect to see the prices of SSD hard drives falling really soon. A rough estimate is around $400 dollar for a 64GB hard drive with 20MB read and 20MB write speed by the next Computex. If the volume kicks in, the price would be halved, just down to a mere $200 for a 64GB hard drive instead.

If the figure of 20 MB/s sounds a bit lowly, you're pretty much close to the truth, but only if you're talking desktop hard drives. At least one manufacturer is considering 48GB drives as an option.