One of the biggest choices to make when buying an MP3 player is whether to get a hard drive MP3 player or a flash memory MP3 player. Even if you know the brand and model of the player that you want, you still probably have the choice to get a hard drive version or a flash version.
But what’s the difference?
The short answer is storage capacity. Hard drive MP3 players can hold more information than flash versions, which is why people often choose hard drive players if they want to store video or other large files.
However, this distinction between the two is rapidly disappearing. At the time this article was written, the largest flash MP3 player could hold 32GB of information, while hard drive MP3 players could hold 120GB. But flash memory is rapidly gaining ground on hard drives because improvements in technology are making it cheaper and smaller.
Hard drive MP3 players use actual spinning discs inside the player (much like the hard drive in your computer) to store information. These drives are mechanically driven and can hold large amounts of information. Flash memory on the other hand does not have to be mechanically driven. It is a static form of memory that is much more durable than hard drives.
Up until recently, flash memory could only be used in small amounts in portable devices, like MP3 players, because it took up too much room and was too expensive at larger capacities. Hard drives cost less per gigabyte and, at capacities larger than 64GB, the hard drive was actually lighter than flash memory.
But flash memory is improving steadily so that in the not too distant future flash MP3 players will be able to contain memory capacities similar to hard drives. When this happens, flash memory will have an obvious advantage over hard drives because flash memory is more rugged, an obvious necessity for mobile devices that travel a lot and get dropped occasionally. In addition, flash memory is faster than hard drives at retrieving information, making your MP3 player even more efficient.
So while the arguments for buying a hard drive or flash MP3 player at the moment mostly revolve around storage capacity, in the near future flash memory will likely push hard drives completely out of the MP3 player industry.
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