I don’t know about you but the ever sliding price of USB flash drives continues to amaze me.

It was barely six months ago I bought a 4GB Corsair Voyager USB flash drive from my local retailer for about $60. Today, I can buy the same thing for $19.

Even 16GB Voyager GT drives – basically the fastest USB flash drive going around – sells in Sydney for as little as $75.

The one thing you do need to be careful of is buying cheap high-capacity USB drives. These tend to use older, slower flash memory, which is fine provided you’re not trying to move a hard drive’s worth of data around the place. Yet with capacities now hitting 64GB, that’s exactly what you’re now capable of moving around.

flash_voyager_gt2So while they won’t be as cheap, it pays to go for the extra read and write speed of the better models.

Most of us won’t be moving 64GB of data around on a USB flash drive every other day, but even so, just 4GB of data will take long enough with some of the ultra-cheap models.

If you’ve got the time, that’s fine but if not, make sure you check out the read and write speeds before you buy.

The massive price drops have come about because flash memory manufacturers are continually churning out higher and higher capacity chips. Couple that with good old competition – even in a recession – and prices can only head in one direction.

In Australia, a basic 8GB USB flash drive now sells for about $35 and when you think an 8GB iPod nano sells for $199, you know not much of your cash is heading towards the storage.

The Australian dollar has been pushing upwind over the last few months and Apple has at least done the right thing here and not raised prices when it probably could have, but it may also mean that Australians will get any update later or at a higher price to compensate. It’s all “swings and roundabouts” in the end.

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