Thursday, August 9, 2012

How much space would 8GB of 3.5" floppies require?

I bought a $7 flash drive recently that holds 8GB.  It's tiny.  Curious, I did some calculations.  If my arithmetic is correct, that 8GB is equivalent to almost 6000 3.5 inch floppy drives, which would fill a cube 5ft on a side.  So by dollar per GB it's about 1000 times cheaper.   3.5 inch disk sales peaked in 2002 at 14 million.  So only ten years later, and we have 8GB flash drives. 


These gentlemen are holding a string to approximate a 5 ft cube.