Re: Cropping Sunlight

On Sunday, in article
<m$M2nUAUhsrHFwZC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Oz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx "Oz" wrote:

buddenbrooks <buddenbrooks@xxxxxx> writes


I added 1GB of memory for £15 to my pc last week. The first time I
bought memory it cost me £8 for 1Kb, So it would 30 years ago have
cost me £8 Million to do the same thing.

They have been saying that about photovoltaics for decades.
Unfortunately the memory cost has been dropping largely because the
devices have been shrinking so that 1kB probably had a bigger chip size
than the 1GB you just bought. That only required a size change of 1:1000
or micro to nano sized devices.

There was also a shift from static to dynamic RAM, which reduced die-
space per bit. There's something similar happening with Flash RAM,
apparently storing 3 bits where previously it stored 2. The sort of
flash-RAM cards in your camera or mobile phone are generally low
quality, and could fail after a couple of hundred thousand writes. I
don't think they have load-balancing built in: the same for cheap
pendrives.

The expensive flash drives meant for inside laptop computers store a lot
of gigabytes, have built-in load balancing, and a 10 or 20-fold better
write life.

With the quoted write speed for the drive, writing 80 or 100 petabytes
before the drive runs out of write cycles, it works out as decades of
life.

The 3 for 2 improvement in capacity makes a huge difference to the life
of such a drive, and while a terabyte on a magnetic drive can be had for
around a hundred quid, if you catch the right sale, for a lot of
portable hardware, the same money on an SSD could give you ample
capacity. Just don't buy old hardware unless you know you can replace
the drive.

--
David G. Bell -- SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.

On the horizon, a carrier task force of the Salvation Navy was
turning into the wind, preparing to launch Zeppelins.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Do you own a Mac Pro?
    ... how much memory do you have? ... external drives. ... believe that is the only way of lowering the cost of a brand new Mac ... Actually when I was originally lusting after a Mac Pro, ...
    (comp.sys.mac.system)
  • Re: Defragment flash drive on Vista
    ... memory drive for 2 reasons. ... There is confusion because there are 2 lives associated with FLASH memory ... levelling' and is designed to extend the life as far as possible). ... the memory means that the drives can be cheaply replaced when a failure does ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Advice Please Re: Hard Drive Speeds Relative to Partition Size
    ... I suppose you might need quite a lot of memory to buffer _all_ 6 ... same ideal for also giving the pagefile exclusive use of a drive of its ... both drives may be the interface: ... virtual memory in the system to avoid real memory being frittered away ...
    (uk.comp.homebuilt)
  • Re: The OTHER problem with Netgear WGT624 (and probably others)
    ... I'm in the maintenance business, ... My job was to calculate the cost of a crash and recovery, ... I tried to setup a 900MHz wireless link (all ... We smash the drives with a large hammer. ...
    (alt.internet.wireless)
  • Re: disppearing disk drives, faultly programs and slow performance
    ... under processes as using 0 memory and would not show up under the ... Also, almost immediately, Internet Explorer stopped working, the link ... The computer virtually stopped when I tried to update itunes from ... my Cd-rom/DVD-rom drives disappeared. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)