The cost of data has begun to decline significantly in recent years. You can now get terabytes of data for a relatively small amount. You can pick up a 1.5 tb hard drive for a cool £75, that’s 1500 gigabytes of data, enough to download and store 3000 full films.
Of course this is in the hard drive market, where costs have been perpetually falling month on month. It’s now entirely expected that you can pick up reams and reams of data for very little money. The really interesting developments are happening on a much smaller scale – inside solid state memory and SD cards. Smaller is better in the computing world, and if you can take your data with you everywhere you go then data gets all the more interesting.
32GB on an SD card will cost you just £63, and you can expect that price to fall by up to 50% over the next year. The leaps and bounds being made really are fantastic news for the consumer, but what can you actually do with all this portable data?
First things first, if you’ve got a portable media player then you can extend the capacity of it significantly. For every GB you add on you can expect to store two more full films, or if you’re more geared towards songs, then you can expect to get 200 more songs. This is why people using iPhone are really missing out on the crash in prices – once you’ve got an iPhone you’re stuck with its capacity. Upgrading the capacity of a player designed to take SD cards is as simple as changing a fuse.
The crash in the cost of memory is making solid state media players a reality for your living room. Plug your memory card into a miniature media player and you’re ready to go, the content can now be streamed from your memory to your TV in one simple step. People will soon be dropping by your house to watch a film they brought over on their iPhone or a memory stick. Of course the drop in memory is also effecting the cost of netbooks, Acer have just launched the Aspire Revo, with a 160GB of storage and HDMI capabilities at the ludicrously cheap cost of £150. These costs are making home media jukeboxes a real possibility, especially when you throw in the open source software that desperately wants to run on these machines.
As the technology marches onwards and upwards we’ll see the next memory battle being taken to the smart card. Just how much data can be squeezed onto something the size of your credit card? The data we carry around with us may soon be a burden, a potential source of income for would be thieves. If they think you’ve got your personal data with you, could it be worth the stealing? For now, you should probably be happy that Universal Smart Cards only have RFID chips in them. And they’re only capable of tracking your every move… scary stuff.
About Author
Dave Matthews is writing on behalf of Universal Smart Cards, a leading retailer of Smart Cards and Portable Security Solutions.
COS SMART CARD IS LIKE A DISK YOU SAVE THINGS ON IT