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hard drives are laughably fragile I can break them by doing this this or this

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and while solid stage storage is much more resistant to some of those things

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it is also delicate in its own way it's highly susceptible to data rot where

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over time your precious Family Photos your elementary school projects or your

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crypto keys can become corrupted or even

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vanish outright well that is where this

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comes in the blouse St storage device

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costs just $30 is as fast as the RAM in

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your gaming PC is immune to Magnetic disruption is resistant to radiation and

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it's got unfathomable endurance remember

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that SSD in your computer well if you were to take that and empty it and

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refill it once per day it would last anywhere from about 9 months to 3 years

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the blouse do storage device try 2.7

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billion years that's over half of the estimated age of this beautiful Rock we

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call Earth but there's a catch while the raw cost of this drive is just $30

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hardly deserving of the crown we bestowed upon it it has a total capacity

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of just 8 kiloby to put that in

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perspective if you wanted to store one single frame of this video you're

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watching right now you would need three of these for a total of $90 and if you

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wanted to replace the 2 TB SSD in your gaming PC it would cost over7

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billion excuse me is this some sort of

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scam who needs this on a USB how does this thing even work well I don't know

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but I'm going to get some answers right

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now where is she Hey where's our

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link down below listen here kid you call

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yourself ferroelectric but there ain't a lick of iron in you how do you explain

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that whoa whoa who you don't have to answer that the word ferroelectric

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indicates the behavior of a material rather than the presence of iron in it

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let me put it in terms of donut eater like you can understand magnetic

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materials have domains that contain dipoles usually these are randomly

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oriented but if you organize the domains so their dipoles are aligned well you've

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got yourself a magnet the same idea works for Ferro electrics but in place

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of an influencing magnetic field it's influenced by an electric current this

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ability to manipulate the state of domains allows us to store data store

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data I don't think so he just said he

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was RAM people like that they're too

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volatile to store data are you profiling my client right now I'm just saying if

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you Google flash memory versus RAM

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pretty much every result's going to tell you flash memory is nonvolatile meaning

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it can store data even when it's unpowered and random access memory is

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volatile that's a false dichotomy and you know it let's talk about why it's

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called RAM originally it was to differentiate from sequential Access

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Memory where you can only read things in a specific order think like a VHS movie

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or a cassette tape you got to fast forward or rewind to get the stuff you

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want that's essentially how all forms of long-term storage work but with varying

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speeds and techniques by contrast RAM allows any individual bit of information

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to be accessed directly the volatility of RAM is not an inherent characteristic

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but a side effect of the modern Technologies we use to make it okay

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sorry can we just drop this bit it's been going kind of long you could call

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it a kilo bit get

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out but just because he's gone doesn't

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mean we're done talking about Ferro El electric RAM and what makes it so

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special Fe RAM uses microscopic crystals

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that contain an atom floating within their structure by applying an electric

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current we can move the atom's position within the crystal this represents a bit

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one or zero the reason it is so durable

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is because unlike nand flash which uses electrons to store bits electrons that

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are desperate to find their way back to equilibrium the crystal contains the

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entire atom and for practical purposes that atom is entirely at rest in either

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position so feam is about as nonvolatile

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as it gets not only not requiring power

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for data retention but also retaining that data unpowered for hundreds of

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years when stored correctly now there are some additional gas to write a

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single bit the entire storage device needs to be completely overwritten for

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instance but luckily as long as your microcontroller can handle the

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throughput it can do that virtually instantaneously making Fe RAM great for

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scenarios where the power could be cut at any moment think like data logging

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for an aircraft or a military vehicle

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which is all super interesting but uh what's the deal with this F RAM USB

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stick let me show you how it works it's got out of the box support for Unix

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based systems but if you're on Windows you're going to need to do a quick tear

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down to flash the firmware luckily I've got all the tools I need in my cargo

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pants from LTT Store.com

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while we're in here by the way why don't we take a look at the guts it's got a

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Raspberry Pi microcontroller a 4 mbte nor flash chip to store firmware and our

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Fe RAM chip once we Flash the firmware we can access it like this it has an on

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device text editor where you can jot down anything you like as long as it

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fits in 8,000 bytes which by default is

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yep about 8,000 characters so what would

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you use it for well most likely long-term storage of critical

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information like say a really important phone number that you really don't want

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to forget or more likely crypto keys or

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passwords uh another option would be to make a time capsule that could be read

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long into the future it only stores text

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out of the box but theoretically you could use a hex Editor to store whatever

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kind of data you want on this thing the only question then is okay we've got

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this technology that has the fast reads and wrs of dram is nonvolatile has

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practically Limitless endurance and is immune to electromagnetic disruption oh

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and I didn't even mention it uses a fraction of the power why aren't we

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using it for everything it comes down to

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density a single sheet of paper can fit about 10,000 characters at 12o font size

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that represents the density of a high-capacity SSD for comparison Fe RAM

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is about 250,000 times less dense that means that

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the size of one of the characters on this page would cover more than 18 city

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blocks in Chicago and my memo would be

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about three times the size of New York City so realistically you're probably

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better off making a quarter million copies and hoping at least one survives

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but hold on you might be

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thinking flash memory came from similarly humble beginnings with early

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chips also being limited to just kilobytes of storage how do we know that

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feam isn't the future well it's the

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crystals the crystals in current ferroelectric RAM can't hold their

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states if they get too small meaning that they will no longer be able to

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store any data at all now there is active Research into various

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non-volatile RAM including new phero electric materials that could scale

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smaller but the question is why would companies bother investing in this Tech

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our large scale computer systems are currently well served by traditional

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forms of RAM and storage even if longevity is is a problem that

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everyone's just kind of ignoring for the time being or well not everyone there

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are multiple long-term storage solutions that come in much larger capacities like

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ultrium tape and mdisk but both of those

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require initial investments in Hardware in order to read and write them and they

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operate on the assumption that that Hardware will still exist when the time

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comes to read them now you could argue that the blouse doall storage device has

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the same problem given that the onboard flash memory and the microcontroller are

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both likely to die long before the Fe RAM will but here's the cool thing you

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actually don't need either of those things to access the data that's stored

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on the F RAM should any other components

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become obsolete or non-functional you can interact directly with the F RAM

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using an sop8 test clip whether it's the year 2050 or 1950 which I only bring up

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as a possibility because the folks at mcdine who manufactured the blow storage

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device also brought brought it up the bottom line is this Tech is pretty cool

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and if you've made it this far into a dense nerdy video you are too so to

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reward you and also to prove just how durable this thing is we're going Segway

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that fits your needs if you guys enjoyed this video why not check out the one we

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did on cam a turbo nerdy dive into what

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could be the future of mainstream memory