If hard drive betters optical digital retrieval

Old news, the real deal is to slot a 64 gig (or bigger !) flash drive (i.e: no moving parts) into your PC of choice with a suberb usb dac, ala one of Gordon Rankins @ :

http://www.usbdacs.com/

or from the likes of

UltraFi- iRoc, Benchmark- DAC1 Pre, PS Audio's LinkDac, & VAC's new USB Dac offering...

A flash drive equipped PC connected to one of the above is currently the "killer app" of audio media hubs in my opinion, and in many instances can totally "dust" a megabuck silver disk based front end...!

With an Apple laptop or MacMini and iPhone or iPod Touch for example, you can have full wireless remote control of your entire library with a comprehensive graphical interface which is light years ahead of any of the current competition in this rapidly evolving sector..and being software based can be updated virtually cost free and easily without alteration to your lossless ripped source library.

All the above can still cost less than a premium hardware device, most of which thus far, poorly attempt to combine half the above features in a proprietary manner...just my 50 cents worth !

Actually some people did have things just like this at CES, including I thing Boulder and someone in the middle level too.

Meridian has always used DVD-ROM drives to allow high speed scans to counteract miss-reads.

Laptop Flash Drives Hit by High Failure Rates

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,143558-c,memory/article.html

"Don't be the first onto the ice, and of course, not the last off."

Soon enough this will be forgotten as reliability betters and size increases.

Bosrt is correct.

Flash memory was never intended to be as fast or reliable as a regular hard drive. Of course, no one envisioned the uses - such as long term storage - that it is used for today. I'll definitely wait and see on this one.

Memory Player fits your question exactly -- still seems to be hard to get though.