07-05-2010, 04:48 AM
davester wrote:
Since SD and USB cards/drives are dirt cheap and capacities have risen far above that of a DVD, why do we still have bulky CD/DVD drives and delicate CDs/DVDs still? Is there some technical reason or is this just inertia, akin to the longevity of floppy disks.
...Given the scarcity of real estate in today's laptops, why haven't these gone the way of the dodo yet?
Optical discs are cheap, familiar and the reliability of optical media is well-known; flash media is much more expensive than optical media when used for similar purposes; it's not clear that the longevity of consumer-grade flash media approaches that of the typical writable CD or DVD; a lot of flash media is slower than optical media; and the ever growing variety of flash media precludes the dominance of any particular standard for long enough to make it worthwhile standardizing on it.
At the rate that new storage devices are emerging, I wouldn't want to bet my fortune on, for example, SDHC cards as a universal standard because there will certainly be something out next year that kicks SDHC's butt and requires new hardware.