hard drives are laughably fragile I can break them by doing this this or this
and while solid stage storage is much more resistant to some of those things
it is also delicate in its own way it's highly susceptible to data rot where
over time your precious Family Photos your elementary school projects or your
crypto keys can become corrupted or even
vanish outright well that is where this
comes in the blouse St storage device
costs just $30 is as fast as the RAM in
your gaming PC is immune to Magnetic disruption is resistant to radiation and
it's got unfathomable endurance remember
that SSD in your computer well if you were to take that and empty it and
refill it once per day it would last anywhere from about 9 months to 3 years
the blouse do storage device try 2.7
billion years that's over half of the estimated age of this beautiful Rock we
call Earth but there's a catch while the raw cost of this drive is just $30
hardly deserving of the crown we bestowed upon it it has a total capacity
of just 8 kiloby to put that in
perspective if you wanted to store one single frame of this video you're
watching right now you would need three of these for a total of $90 and if you
wanted to replace the 2 TB SSD in your gaming PC it would cost over7
billion excuse me is this some sort of
scam who needs this on a USB how does this thing even work well I don't know
but I'm going to get some answers right
now where is she Hey where's our
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link down below listen here kid you call
yourself ferroelectric but there ain't a lick of iron in you how do you explain
that whoa whoa who you don't have to answer that the word ferroelectric
indicates the behavior of a material rather than the presence of iron in it
let me put it in terms of donut eater like you can understand magnetic
materials have domains that contain dipoles usually these are randomly
oriented but if you organize the domains so their dipoles are aligned well you've
got yourself a magnet the same idea works for Ferro electrics but in place
of an influencing magnetic field it's influenced by an electric current this
ability to manipulate the state of domains allows us to store data store
data I don't think so he just said he
was RAM people like that they're too
volatile to store data are you profiling my client right now I'm just saying if
you Google flash memory versus RAM
pretty much every result's going to tell you flash memory is nonvolatile meaning
it can store data even when it's unpowered and random access memory is
volatile that's a false dichotomy and you know it let's talk about why it's
called RAM originally it was to differentiate from sequential Access
Memory where you can only read things in a specific order think like a VHS movie
or a cassette tape you got to fast forward or rewind to get the stuff you
want that's essentially how all forms of long-term storage work but with varying
speeds and techniques by contrast RAM allows any individual bit of information
to be accessed directly the volatility of RAM is not an inherent characteristic
but a side effect of the modern Technologies we use to make it okay
sorry can we just drop this bit it's been going kind of long you could call
it a kilo bit get
out but just because he's gone doesn't
mean we're done talking about Ferro El electric RAM and what makes it so
special Fe RAM uses microscopic crystals
that contain an atom floating within their structure by applying an electric
current we can move the atom's position within the crystal this represents a bit
one or zero the reason it is so durable
is because unlike nand flash which uses electrons to store bits electrons that
are desperate to find their way back to equilibrium the crystal contains the
entire atom and for practical purposes that atom is entirely at rest in either
position so feam is about as nonvolatile
as it gets not only not requiring power
for data retention but also retaining that data unpowered for hundreds of
years when stored correctly now there are some additional gas to write a
single bit the entire storage device needs to be completely overwritten for
instance but luckily as long as your microcontroller can handle the
throughput it can do that virtually instantaneously making Fe RAM great for
scenarios where the power could be cut at any moment think like data logging
for an aircraft or a military vehicle
which is all super interesting but uh what's the deal with this F RAM USB
stick let me show you how it works it's got out of the box support for Unix
based systems but if you're on Windows you're going to need to do a quick tear
down to flash the firmware luckily I've got all the tools I need in my cargo
pants from LTT Store.com
while we're in here by the way why don't we take a look at the guts it's got a
Raspberry Pi microcontroller a 4 mbte nor flash chip to store firmware and our
Fe RAM chip once we Flash the firmware we can access it like this it has an on
device text editor where you can jot down anything you like as long as it
fits in 8,000 bytes which by default is
yep about 8,000 characters so what would
you use it for well most likely long-term storage of critical
information like say a really important phone number that you really don't want
to forget or more likely crypto keys or
passwords uh another option would be to make a time capsule that could be read
long into the future it only stores text
out of the box but theoretically you could use a hex Editor to store whatever
kind of data you want on this thing the only question then is okay we've got
this technology that has the fast reads and wrs of dram is nonvolatile has
practically Limitless endurance and is immune to electromagnetic disruption oh
and I didn't even mention it uses a fraction of the power why aren't we
using it for everything it comes down to
density a single sheet of paper can fit about 10,000 characters at 12o font size
that represents the density of a high-capacity SSD for comparison Fe RAM
is about 250,000 times less dense that means that
the size of one of the characters on this page would cover more than 18 city
blocks in Chicago and my memo would be
about three times the size of New York City so realistically you're probably
better off making a quarter million copies and hoping at least one survives
but hold on you might be
thinking flash memory came from similarly humble beginnings with early
chips also being limited to just kilobytes of storage how do we know that
feam isn't the future well it's the
crystals the crystals in current ferroelectric RAM can't hold their
states if they get too small meaning that they will no longer be able to
store any data at all now there is active Research into various
non-volatile RAM including new phero electric materials that could scale
smaller but the question is why would companies bother investing in this Tech
our large scale computer systems are currently well served by traditional
forms of RAM and storage even if longevity is is a problem that
everyone's just kind of ignoring for the time being or well not everyone there
are multiple long-term storage solutions that come in much larger capacities like
ultrium tape and mdisk but both of those
require initial investments in Hardware in order to read and write them and they
operate on the assumption that that Hardware will still exist when the time
comes to read them now you could argue that the blouse doall storage device has
the same problem given that the onboard flash memory and the microcontroller are
both likely to die long before the Fe RAM will but here's the cool thing you
actually don't need either of those things to access the data that's stored
on the F RAM should any other components
become obsolete or non-functional you can interact directly with the F RAM
using an sop8 test clip whether it's the year 2050 or 1950 which I only bring up
as a possibility because the folks at mcdine who manufactured the blow storage
device also brought brought it up the bottom line is this Tech is pretty cool
and if you've made it this far into a dense nerdy video you are too so to
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
did on cam a turbo nerdy dive into what
could be the future of mainstream memory