This USB drive is a steal (from your wallet)
Or at least that’s the way it normally works. I was looking for a link to send my mother to show her what a usb flash drive looks like and about what one should cost. She is not very tech savvy but wanted one for the digital photo frame that I got her for Christmas so she can take images I send her and put them on it. I figured I would just send her a link to google shopping so she can see what they are and what they are going for. That’s when this caught my eye.
No, I didn’t photoshop this it’s the actual item and it sells at this price from reputable online stores like buy.com. Here is the link. I was pretty shocked as you can pick up 2 gig usb drives for under $10 now but thought it must have built in networking or something. After looking over the product PDF (shows a family overjoyed that they just spent half a mortgage payment on a 2 gig USB drive) I didn’t see anything that merited the price. I think the PDF should have looked more like this
This is how people that are non-tech savvy get get confused. Hell, I’m confused. I am sure somewhere, someone advised another person to “just get a USB drive” and that person thinking “you get what you pay for” bought what they thought was the best they could get. Just for comparison I made a graph using the buy.com price for this drive compared against a 1TB external drive tiger direct has on sale (good deal BTW!)
The best explanation I can come up with is that this must be the preferred drive of U.S. government agencies. The pentagon paid $998,798 to ship two 19 cent washers so I am sure they would look at this drive as a bargain!
There is a up side to this story though
Hewlett-Packard’s stock has went up with the introduction of this drive 
tags: USB, drive
