Storage evolution
A DVD holds 4.7 GB (per side). An SD card holds 4 GiB. For $20, almost as much storage as the DVD fits in a card barely smaller than the DVD's plastic hub.
2008-03-10 03:44:11
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A DVD holds 4.7 GB (per side). An SD card holds 4 GiB. For $20, almost as much storage as the DVD fits in a card barely smaller than the DVD's plastic hub.
March 10th, 2008 at 09:37:19
Yup … and the most interesting thing about that is that even though the prices seem close to the consumer, optical media still wins by a landslide as far as the producer is concerned.
It costs pennies — I don’t know the exact figures any more, but no more than 25-50 cents per unit — to do large-scale manufacturing of a double-sided DVD-9 with 9GB of content. Meanwhile the manufacturing cost of the SD card is awfully close to the retail price. So SD costs 40x more, and has less than half the capacity. Ouch.
Sadly, optical media is far from dead because nothing comes close to its price-vs-capacity ratio. Downloading is the most likely thing to kill it in the future, but broadband penetration is still lacking and snails-with-DVDs [pdf] are still winning that fight by a landslide. I give it another ten years at least.