English to Chinese Tech/Engineering Computers: Systems, Networks

Market drivers for increased digital audio player sales include falling prices (iPod is getting more competition), the availability of songs from multiple legitimate sources (subscription and pay-per-download), smaller hard disk drives (HDDs), multi-GByte flash memories (you can now buy a 1 GByte USB thumb memory for about $60), and newer audio compression algorithms. A 60 GByte HDD can hold around 20K songs, but how many people really need that kind of capacity (notice I said "need," not "want")? At over 300 songs per GByte of storage, a digital audio player using a 2 GByte Flash memory is smaller, less expensive, and has a longer battery life than a player with an HDD. As large flash memory prices continue to drop in 2005, look for Flash-based players to gain in popularity for people who can suffer with 'only' around a 1000 song capacity on their audio players.