Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage,uk.comp.vendors,uk.comp.homebuilt (
More info?)
"Lem" <lem@mail.com> wrote in message
news:94C49B80E910391F3A2@130.133.1.4...
> "Ohaya" <Ohaya@NO_SPAM.cox.net> wrote:
>
> > As with most technology things, there are "price points".
> > Specifically, wrt these memory dongles, I've found that at any
> > given time, prices for certain sizes are really good, and
> > other sizes not so good.
> >
> > In my case, I wanted to get one for awhile, and waited till
> > the prices of 128MB dongles were (to me) good, and I bought
> > one. A couple of months later, the 128MB dongles were half
> > what i paid, then they kind of levelled off.
> >
> > I think you wait until the size that will be most useful to
> > you gets relatively cheap, and then you get one
.
> >
> > Even with the price drops after I bought mine, I found that I
> > used it a lot more than I thought that I would, for moving
> > files, etc., so I'm glad I did get it, even though the same
> > 128MB dongle is cheaper now.
>
>
> Good points. The thing in the back of my mind is that mainboard
> memory has in the past gone up and down. Although the trend is
> downward it seems that there are some pretty big swings either way
> and these swings can last for something 6 months or so.
>
> So I am not clear what to go for and when.
>
> Does anyone have a better picture of the market than I do and who
> can advise?
You have to remember that these Dongles all use flash memory, not DRAM, and
my gut feel tells me that you won't see the kinds of "swings" that you might
see in DRAM/DIMM markets.
Such swings are usually an abberation in most cases anyway, IMHO, e.g., a
couple of years ago, when there was a fire in a Toshiba factory and the
prices of LCD panels went up... for awhile, then started dropping again.
So my advice is still the same: Decide if you can use it, and if so, how
much memory you'd need, watch for price points vs. memory size, then get it.
If you try to chase prices down, you'll never get the "best" price, and if
you don't have a real use for it, it'll never be "worth" whatever price you
paid for it... The only exception to this is when manufacturers "end of
life" products, but the products still have demand, then you'll see the
prices start climbing again (e.g., older, slower Duron chips
), I
wouldn't anticipate that to happen with these dongles since USB 1.1 is
backwards compatible with 2.0. I would note that I have seen some posts
about people having problems with one of the USB2.0/256MB dongles
compatibility.
Also, MaximumPC had an article where they "tortured" a bunch of dongles...
Jim
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