Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: text style from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poette and
Speaker 1: I am an editor at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me, as he always does on the
Speaker 1: occasions on which we podcast is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: End of line. Thank you very much for listening. And oh,
Speaker 1: Emily is gonna write in. She hasn't written in about
Speaker 1: that in a long time. That's true, Well, we haven't
Speaker 1: done in a long time. So today's episode comes to
Speaker 1: us as a result of many, many listener males, and
Speaker 1: so I'm not gonna read them all, but to Kara,
Speaker 1: Ryan and Justin in particular, and I'm sure there were more,
Speaker 1: but those were the three who popped up immediately. Um,
Speaker 1: this podcast is for you. All of you guys want
Speaker 1: to know how hard drives or hard disks work. So
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk a bit about hard drives, and not
Speaker 1: just not just the old fashioned hard drives, but the
Speaker 1: new fangled solid state devices as well, and throwing some
Speaker 1: some other storage media. I think oh I got, I
Speaker 1: got a little bit on some others, notepads, and yes,
Speaker 1: exactly stone tablets, stone tablets. So let's let's talk about
Speaker 1: let's talk about the anatomy of a hard drive. Okay,
Speaker 1: I was going to start out with a little history.
Speaker 1: Oh that is even better, begin with your history, professor Palette. Um,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you a little bit of a story. My
Speaker 1: first computer wasn't Amigo one thousand, which I got in
Speaker 1: the mid nineties, and it had no hard drive whatsoever.
Speaker 1: My Apple to eat also had no hard drive. So
Speaker 1: you might think that hard drives, which are now you know,
Speaker 1: ubiquitous there in almost anything, including you know, uh, tablets
Speaker 1: and you know, netbooks and things that that are very small,
Speaker 1: you might think, well, hey, you know these have been
Speaker 1: around for a very short time. Not the truth. Oh weird.
Speaker 1: I was just thinking they were amphibious. So anyway, amphibious
Speaker 1: what you said? Okay, So no, uh, hard drives actually
Speaker 1: have been with us since the nineteen fifties, except they
Speaker 1: were very very large. Um and uh it's apparently up
Speaker 1: to in diameter and they would hold just a few megabytes,
Speaker 1: which is very much like the first hard drive I
Speaker 1: had in my second computer, the Mega three thousand had
Speaker 1: well actually still has a hard drive that will hold uh,
Speaker 1: you know, just forty megabytes, which is very small. But
Speaker 1: but these original discs were called fixed disks, or if
Speaker 1: you were an IBM customer, you might know them as winchesters. Um.
Speaker 1: And basically the reason they're called hard hard disks are
Speaker 1: hard drives is because this is in contrast to floppy disks,
Speaker 1: which are you know, made of a magnetic storage medium
Speaker 1: very much like uh, tape that you might see in
Speaker 1: a cassette tape or an eight track tape or videotape. Um.
Speaker 1: But hard drives themselves getting into your into your anatomy
Speaker 1: uh lecture on hard disks here. Um. Yeah, they're they're
Speaker 1: actually not that dissimilar because hard drives are also magnetic media, right,
Speaker 1: but they are glass or aluminum or some form of
Speaker 1: harder material. It's not like that filmy, flimsy stuff that
Speaker 1: you would see in a cassette tape. Right. So that's
Speaker 1: where the hard drive or hard disk comes from. We're
Speaker 1: talking about. It's stored on a medium that is uh,
Speaker 1: that's that's not this little flimsy material. So that's another
Speaker 1: thing we should talk about just very quickly, since we're
Speaker 1: talking about you mentioned floppy disks, which some of our
Speaker 1: listeners may be thinking hua a floppy disk. Some of
Speaker 1: our listeners are very young, and I have not been
Speaker 1: around since floppy disks kind of died. But I like
Speaker 1: to think of the tech stuff audience as being you know,
Speaker 1: fairly technology technologically savvy. You know, even our younger listeners
Speaker 1: probably know what a floppy disk. Actually, some of the
Speaker 1: very younger listeners are probably more savvy than we are.
Speaker 1: So the reason why we call them floppy disks is
Speaker 1: because the magnetic medium on pond which the data is
Speaker 1: stored is is flexible. Um. The disc itself may or
Speaker 1: may not be semi flexible. So the old five and
Speaker 1: a quarter inch discs, for example, they had a very
Speaker 1: uh thin protective coating, plastic coating, uh, and you could
Speaker 1: they were flexible. You weren't supposed to bend them because
Speaker 1: it would screw it up, but you could. Yeah. As
Speaker 1: as a matter of fact, the hard disc predates the
Speaker 1: floppy disk because Alan Shugart at IBM in ninety seven, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, came up with an eight inch floppy disk.
Speaker 1: UM and basically it gradually moved to a smaller disc
Speaker 1: five and a quarter inches UM, and that debut in
Speaker 1: in August. Um. Problem with that particular model was that
Speaker 1: it had a part of the media was exposed, so
Speaker 1: you could you could you know, poke it with your
Speaker 1: finger or you know, a needle, or your cat could
Speaker 1: throw up on it. Uh. And that's a problem because
Speaker 1: all of those things happened to me in the same day.
Speaker 1: That's bad day. Well, poking it with your finger is
Speaker 1: not such a problem necessarily as the other two. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the thing. If you crease it or something happens
Speaker 1: to damage that material, then it makes it very difficult
Speaker 1: to read. And when they came out with a three
Speaker 1: and a half inch floppy disk, which is in some
Speaker 1: use still in Japan, just stopped supporting it. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: this year, there's some of the supply classet here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's nothing I know of in the office that can
Speaker 1: run one. No. No, I've seen a couple of older
Speaker 1: machines with it on there. Oh my gosh, they have
Speaker 1: dust on them. I pity those people to use those machines,
Speaker 1: but to but no, the thing is, when when those
Speaker 1: came out, they put a little metal slide, said that
Speaker 1: the computer when you would insert it, it would the
Speaker 1: computer would move the slide over and be able to
Speaker 1: read and write information to that floppy disk. And they
Speaker 1: also had a harder plastic coating so that you wouldn't
Speaker 1: fold a three and a half inch disk. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 1: since we're into the alternative media thing, I will I
Speaker 1: will say, you know, as as time went on, uh,
Speaker 1: and other formats came out. I Omega's zip drive and
Speaker 1: jazz drive both removable storage media like the floppy disk,
Speaker 1: just at a higher density you can hold uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a gigabyte or two on some of the heavier uh discs.
Speaker 1: But they're essentially the same thing, you know, removable media. Now,
Speaker 1: I remember, you know a couple other storage media that
Speaker 1: were like that, that were that came in a case
Speaker 1: like that, But we're optical discs. But those really fell
Speaker 1: out of favor, I think with the advent of broadband
Speaker 1: connections and really large hard drives. So getting back to
Speaker 1: the whole hard drive issue and uh and the fact
Speaker 1: that we're talking about these other forms of storage. As
Speaker 1: we were mentioning they were all magnetic forms of storage, yes,
Speaker 1: just like cassettes. In fact, some of the early computers
Speaker 1: used cassettes rather than discs. But and and that does
Speaker 1: also mean that that would also be why you did
Speaker 1: not want to have your storage medium next to any
Speaker 1: kind of magnet, because it would could screw up your
Speaker 1: your your data. I mean, it would erase essentially your
Speaker 1: data because it would everything would align to the magnetic
Speaker 1: field of the magnet and you would no longer have
Speaker 1: that storage. Well, I mean that's that's part of erasing
Speaker 1: the information. Magnetizing. So magnets plus computers equals bad. Right,
Speaker 1: So you're so in all these cases, the information is
Speaker 1: stored through a magnetic medium. So you've got you've got
Speaker 1: the disc, and within hard disc you have we call
Speaker 1: them platters. That the discs are actually platters, and there
Speaker 1: may there's usually multiple platters per hard drive. It's not
Speaker 1: just one disk sitting inside a little metal box. If
Speaker 1: you were to ever look at a hard drive, it
Speaker 1: does tend to look like a little metal box. Usually
Speaker 1: there are several platters within that. And so think of
Speaker 1: the platters. It's kind of like a uh, I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, a record player, but what who am I kidding?
Speaker 1: Smoke gets in your eyes? A record kids? No, please,
Speaker 1: those the kids. I'm saying, the kids are not gonna
Speaker 1: know if I say a record player, Um, think of
Speaker 1: a serious player that can hold several CDs. They still
Speaker 1: make CDs, right, I haven't listened to one in ages. Okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 1: Another thing to mention. If you want to take a
Speaker 1: part of hard drive to look at this, do it
Speaker 1: with a drive that you are no longer ever going
Speaker 1: to use for anything. Yea, because it'll ruin it. Because
Speaker 1: it will ruin it. But if you if you take
Speaker 1: a part a hard drive that is busted and will
Speaker 1: no longer be used for anything, you will see that
Speaker 1: there are are silver platters in there. Uh. In some
Speaker 1: cases there are multiple pladders, right, Like that's what I
Speaker 1: was mentioning there, yeah, yeah, And and on each deck
Speaker 1: there's gonna be a little arm that can that will
Speaker 1: have the device that reads and writes data to those discs. Now,
Speaker 1: here's the difference between the the platters and say the
Speaker 1: cassette medium. Uh, the device that reads and writes data
Speaker 1: does not actually make contact with the disk. You do
Speaker 1: not want that to happen. No, If you hear a
Speaker 1: clicking noise from your hard drive, that probably means that
Speaker 1: the arm, the read right arm is actually making contact
Speaker 1: with the platter, which means it's damaging the hard drive
Speaker 1: and you should stop using it and get it repaired
Speaker 1: as soon as you can, because otherwise what's going to
Speaker 1: happen is it's going to corrupt the data on that
Speaker 1: disc or it's going to ruin the hard drive and
Speaker 1: you won't be able to access the information. Right. That's
Speaker 1: called a hard drive crash. Yeah, and it's bad head
Speaker 1: crash actually. Yeah. So so anyway, each one of the
Speaker 1: platters has of these arms, are sometimes multiple arms more
Speaker 1: than one, and the arms can move towards the center
Speaker 1: and towards the edge of the disk, uh dozens of
Speaker 1: times per second to try and find the data. And
Speaker 1: the data is stored. If you were to if you
Speaker 1: were to look at a platter and you were to
Speaker 1: be able to see the way data is stored, like
Speaker 1: you somehow were able to dawn magic glasses and you
Speaker 1: looked at the platter and like, oh, look at that.
Speaker 1: You would see that the information is is organized within
Speaker 1: concentric circles from the edge of the platter all the
Speaker 1: way into the center. So you just think of those
Speaker 1: concentric circles. Now, those are tracks, and they would also
Speaker 1: be organized in wedges, so sort of like a pie
Speaker 1: pie and pie. Those wedges are sectors. So data is
Speaker 1: is always going to be found within a track and
Speaker 1: a sector, and the computer has to keep track of
Speaker 1: which sectors and try x have the data ware. You know.
Speaker 1: That's when it's when your computer is searching for stuff.
Speaker 1: It's going through all the different sectors and tracks trying
Speaker 1: to find the correct information. UM and each track within
Speaker 1: a sector can only hold a certain amount of data.
Speaker 1: It's not like you could say, like, well, I've got
Speaker 1: this two gigabyte file, I want it all to be
Speaker 1: stored right here on this part of this platter. That's
Speaker 1: not the way it works, good luck. Yeah, it's going
Speaker 1: to break that up, uh, that file up into segments
Speaker 1: and store it on various tracks in various sectors. And
Speaker 1: it's not even necessarily going to be on the same platter.
Speaker 1: Yeah it could be. It could be uh across several platters,
Speaker 1: depending upon how your data is stored. And UH as
Speaker 1: this happens, as as you go on filling up a
Speaker 1: hard drive, UH, these files can get more and more
Speaker 1: fragmented because there are fewer sectors that have an uninterrupted,
Speaker 1: you know series that you could store all the information
Speaker 1: right there, so it's all within the same general area.
Speaker 1: That's why you want to defrag your hard drive every
Speaker 1: now and then. Yeah, the more fragmented your your data get, uh,
Speaker 1: it makes it that much more difficult for your computer
Speaker 1: to find all the pieces of a file, and that's
Speaker 1: going to slow down your computing time. So it's a
Speaker 1: good idea to keep everything nicely organized so that it
Speaker 1: speeds you up and makes it a little less frustrating
Speaker 1: to use your computer on a day to day basis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I made this this comparison in a previous podcast, but
Speaker 1: so you might remember it. But think of your data.
Speaker 1: Think of a hard drive as like a h a
Speaker 1: multi story building, and and your data is stored in boxes.
Speaker 1: But the boxes are not all in the same room
Speaker 1: on the same floor. Some of your boxes are on
Speaker 1: the top floor, some of them are in several rooms
Speaker 1: in the middle, and then you've got one in the basement.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the way your hard drive is working.
Speaker 1: That's the way it might store a file. The bits
Speaker 1: of the file might be in various sections of the
Speaker 1: different platters. Now these platters are spending really, really fast,
Speaker 1: and the arms are moving very very quickly. So even
Speaker 1: though it sounds like this is a real mishmash way
Speaker 1: of doing it, it doesn't take relatively that long for
Speaker 1: a computer to find the information. Uh. It does take
Speaker 1: longer as you use the computer. That's what we're talking
Speaker 1: about with the whole fragment defragment thing. You may notice
Speaker 1: as your computer ages that takes longer for you to
Speaker 1: pull certain kinds of files and programs up and again.
Speaker 1: Defragging your hard drive can sometimes help fix that a
Speaker 1: little bit. Yeah, it's not guaranteed to uh to increase
Speaker 1: your computing speed a thousandfold or anything like that, but
Speaker 1: it will perk things up a bit. Yeah, it's really Um,
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here is seek time, Right. It
Speaker 1: will decrease the amount of time it takes to seek
Speaker 1: out that data. It's not gonna make your processor faster,
Speaker 1: it's just gonna make it easier for the computer to
Speaker 1: find the information that you want. Um. There's another speed
Speaker 1: of information transferle that we have to talk about, which
Speaker 1: is called the data rate. Now, that's the speed at
Speaker 1: which the hard drive is able to deliver information to
Speaker 1: your computer's processor. Yep um and those speeds vary depending
Speaker 1: upon what kind of hard drive and microprocessor you have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the that information is useful when you're looking for a
Speaker 1: hard drive if you're interested in buying a new drive
Speaker 1: for your computer. UM. Also the speed at which the
Speaker 1: platters spin. A lot of people prefer a faster speed. UM.
Speaker 1: The trouble is that once you get into that in
Speaker 1: larger drive sizes, you're starting to talk about more money um.
Speaker 1: You know. But for things that are you know, speed oriented,
Speaker 1: like for example, I don't know, gaming, you probably want
Speaker 1: a faster hard drive or capturing lots and lots of video.
Speaker 1: If you're capturing let's say you want to capture high
Speaker 1: definition video you've shot You've shot a film, an HD film, right,
Speaker 1: and you want to be able to capture that video
Speaker 1: onto your computer. You're gonna want a hard drive that
Speaker 1: spends very quickly, that has a very big capacity because
Speaker 1: HD footage takes up a huge amount of data space,
Speaker 1: and you want to be able to transfer the information
Speaker 1: as quickly as possible. So uh to to just to
Speaker 1: speed up the whole capturing UM sequence because that takes
Speaker 1: a really long time depending on the speed of your
Speaker 1: computer and the connection you're using, like if you were
Speaker 1: using FireWire, that's that's pretty fast. If you're using USB
Speaker 1: two point oh, it's not as fast. It depends on
Speaker 1: the FireWire, that's true. I'm talking about like I'm thinking
Speaker 1: of like the most recent USB three, assuming that that
Speaker 1: ever actually gets to us in a real widespread way,
Speaker 1: should put USB right back up there with FireWire. Um,
Speaker 1: someone's going to think about that. Well, the thing is
Speaker 1: they keep one upping each other. Is kind of an
Speaker 1: also ran at this point. I mean, I mean, Apple
Speaker 1: still really supports it, but that's about it, not even
Speaker 1: as much as they used to. Yeah, but to the
Speaker 1: most recent IMAX, that's a totally different subject. I should't
Speaker 1: even get into it. To the best of my knowledge,
Speaker 1: the more recent machines do actually that. That's that's relevant though,
Speaker 1: because if you're talking about hooking up another drive to
Speaker 1: your computer, like an external drive, you're gonna this is
Speaker 1: again something to consider. You're gonna want a nice fast
Speaker 1: data rate, and you're gonna see on professional computers, top
Speaker 1: of the line PCs and MAX both are going to
Speaker 1: have you know, you're you'll have more options like the
Speaker 1: faster FireWire and the faster USB connections, you know versus
Speaker 1: you know, something you might see on your consumer level
Speaker 1: or you know, for example, a netbook or something you're
Speaker 1: probably not it's not going to be because they're not
Speaker 1: designed for you know, high end applications computing on the go.
Speaker 1: Um So I mean it is it? Yeah, it is relevant.
Speaker 1: But yeah, as far as I know, the Apple still
Speaker 1: includes the higher higher speed one port I think on
Speaker 1: the the the iMac and probably a couple on the
Speaker 1: power Max. But um, anyway, that's what they call them now,
Speaker 1: the Mac pros. There we go. Anyway, someone wanted inbout
Speaker 1: that I wouldn't know I've got an anti Mac bias. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: we've been told. Um so, actually, uh, it might be
Speaker 1: a good time to talk about some of the drawbacks
Speaker 1: of hard drives because you know, over time they've become smaller,
Speaker 1: they've become more efficient. They there, they can be running
Speaker 1: faster speeds. Um you say smaller, you mean smaller physically
Speaker 1: so you can run. Well, yes, they can't hold more data. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I just want to make sure we clarified smaller.
Speaker 1: But well, let's take another Apple product into a two perspective.
Speaker 1: I have a four G black and white iPod which
Speaker 1: has a hard drive in it and you can hear it.
Speaker 1: When you play a song, it spins up and starts
Speaker 1: accessing the information on there, so they can tell me
Speaker 1: what tracks are available, and I can I can listen
Speaker 1: to a song. But Apple has moved away from physical
Speaker 1: hard drives because of their limitations, like, for example, if
Speaker 1: you drop one on the ground and it is still spinning,
Speaker 1: it will likely start to click because it is a
Speaker 1: very easy way to cause a head crash. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: and they're they're not the most durable things in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're not necessarily the kind of device you would want
Speaker 1: to use if you were like, for example, the iPods
Speaker 1: a good a good choice. Let's say you want to
Speaker 1: do lots of exercise and stuff. Um, well, if you've
Speaker 1: got a device that has moving parts in it, then
Speaker 1: the jitter that it suffers as you run up and
Speaker 1: down your street or whatever. Um or being chased by vagabonds,
Speaker 1: as is often the case with me. Um, I have
Speaker 1: a I live in a vagabond heavy part of town.
Speaker 1: I moved from thug Central to Vagabond Bill and it's
Speaker 1: actually been an improvement in my lifestyle. But that's neither
Speaker 1: here nor there, Jonathan. Yeah, you know, I do live
Speaker 1: right across the street from train tracks, so that's true.
Speaker 1: I'm hoping is listening to this Hobo love. That's gonna
Speaker 1: be the name of my first record album. So at
Speaker 1: any rate you've got this, If you have moving parts
Speaker 1: and the device as you're jogging around, then clearly then
Speaker 1: those those moving parts could suffer as a result, and
Speaker 1: then you could end up shortening the life of your device.
Speaker 1: To get away from that, you would want to choose
Speaker 1: some sort of memory format that did not have moving parts.
Speaker 1: And we'll get into that in just a minute, because
Speaker 1: you know, we want to dedicate a good amount of
Speaker 1: time to solid state. But let's keep talking about the
Speaker 1: I was afraid I was segway too early. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: well I was just gonna say that. We already brought
Speaker 1: up the magnet thing, right right. But also just the
Speaker 1: fact that it has moving parts. You know, it has
Speaker 1: a motor. There's a motor that turns those platters and
Speaker 1: the arm as well. Um, motors can break down, motors
Speaker 1: can overheat. Uh, whenever you have the moving parts, there
Speaker 1: are certain dangers that are going to come with that.
Speaker 1: And for most hard drives, those dangers are going to
Speaker 1: be something that you'd see to prolonged use, right, Like,
Speaker 1: so older computers are more prone to hardware failure than
Speaker 1: than computers that are fresh off the line, assuming that
Speaker 1: you're not buying a limon, yes, and and hard drives
Speaker 1: are you know, I'm sure a computer engineer will tell you. Um,
Speaker 1: someone had told me once that hard drive often fails
Speaker 1: either very early in its life cycle, and we would
Speaker 1: assume at that point that it's a lemon or you know,
Speaker 1: a couple of years down the road, probably a couple
Speaker 1: is oversimplification here, but I mean it's it's it's not
Speaker 1: like it's immune from failure, you know, something where you
Speaker 1: really need to back up your hard drive often because
Speaker 1: there is a possibility that something will fail. A mechanical
Speaker 1: engineer will tell you, as my father, who is a
Speaker 1: mechanical engineer, often told me, the more moving parts you have,
Speaker 1: the increased likelihood that something eventually will break, right, because
Speaker 1: you have more points of failure exactly. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's that's logical. So that kind of explains sort of
Speaker 1: the move to the solid state drives. Yes, now, which
Speaker 1: you know again iPods and zoons and I think just
Speaker 1: about everybody who has something like that now all use
Speaker 1: flash memory of some sort and lots of netbooks are
Speaker 1: using it, not all, but lots of them, as of them,
Speaker 1: and and you're starting to see it in other things
Speaker 1: like laptops as well. UM, solid state is has got
Speaker 1: a few advantages. Uh, it's it doesn't It doesn't store
Speaker 1: data magnetically. For one thing. It's all about controlling the
Speaker 1: flow of electrons, whether gates are opened or closed. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's the electronically erasable programmable read only memory aspect of it,
Speaker 1: or e PROM Yes. I was like what, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: And it has two different kinds of gates. It's the
Speaker 1: information is laid out. Think of the information on a
Speaker 1: flash drive. So we're talking about like the USB drives,
Speaker 1: or say the chips that you put into a video
Speaker 1: game controller to store ave games, a camera, yeah, cameras,
Speaker 1: the SD cards, things like that. Um, you have a
Speaker 1: series of transistors and they're laid out on a grid,
Speaker 1: and you've got uh floating gates and control gates, and
Speaker 1: these essentially control whether or not electrons passed through that grid,
Speaker 1: and that's what determines whether the data on that UH
Speaker 1: in that section of the drive is a one or
Speaker 1: a zero, right, And because again all information and computers
Speaker 1: ultimately is stored as a series of ones and zeros,
Speaker 1: that would be yes, um, and then uh, you've got
Speaker 1: so the see I what if I can remember how
Speaker 1: the rows and columns go. I know that the the
Speaker 1: row is the word line, and I think the column
Speaker 1: is the bitline. Is that right? Um, you don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, okay, so um uh yeah, anyway, see
Speaker 1: if I have that in my home. It's been a
Speaker 1: long time since I've actually written about solid state drives,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately I've been concentrating on other things. But in
Speaker 1: any of the floating gates, link to the row. The
Speaker 1: row is the wordline. Just do the control gate. Oh
Speaker 1: got you? Got you okay, so uh again controlling the
Speaker 1: flow of electrons for for bits. Now, the nice thing
Speaker 1: about solid state electronics is that they can be even
Speaker 1: smaller than the smallest um physical hard drives, so you
Speaker 1: don't have to have a motor, so that takes up
Speaker 1: less space right there. Um, they're very very portable, uh,
Speaker 1: and they can hold a surprisingly large amount of information.
Speaker 1: And you know, I remember back when you would get
Speaker 1: a USB drive and it might or a little thumb drive,
Speaker 1: a little flash drive and it would be maybe a
Speaker 1: Meg's And now you know it's no big deal. Like
Speaker 1: if when I go to conferences, a lot of these
Speaker 1: companies will put their press material onto a USB drive
Speaker 1: as opposed to giving you a six pounds of of paper. Right.
Speaker 1: And in these cases I get for gigabyte or larger
Speaker 1: USB drives on occasion. Most are around two. But you
Speaker 1: know they get bigger than that easily. Um, so it's
Speaker 1: actually really really impressive. And they don't since they don't
Speaker 1: have the moving parts, so you don't have the same
Speaker 1: risk of failure as you do with a a physical
Speaker 1: hard drive like the platter hard drive. Um, they're both physical.
Speaker 1: I don't know why I used that word, so please
Speaker 1: don't write in I know they're both physical. Uh mechanical,
Speaker 1: I guess I should say, because it has a quitter function.
Speaker 1: The downside is that solid state electronics tend to be
Speaker 1: much more expensive, so as you get to the higher
Speaker 1: capacity drives, you start reaching, um a price point that
Speaker 1: is much greater than if you were to get a
Speaker 1: comparative platter system. M Um, that's the biggest drawback. I
Speaker 1: think with the solid state versus platter. Another drawback that
Speaker 1: I've read about is that flash memory can only be
Speaker 1: written to a finite number of times. Eventually it will
Speaker 1: wear out. UM so they're not immune from failure either.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, I I think I would avoid
Speaker 1: exposing them to you know, fire water magnets. You know,
Speaker 1: I know they're not magnetic, but I don't think it's
Speaker 1: probably a good idea to stick a you know, twelve
Speaker 1: pound test magnet next to it. Of course, I have
Speaker 1: an aversion to twelve pound test magnets because I had
Speaker 1: a bad experience with one as a child. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: vagabonds involved. But there was a bear. Oh wow, a
Speaker 1: bear and a wow, that's the story I need to hear.
Speaker 1: It was a it was a grizzly encounter. Let's just
Speaker 1: say that nice. Um. I also just just to go
Speaker 1: back just a touch, I was right about the bitline.
Speaker 1: I had to go through my notes and I found
Speaker 1: it so wordline, wordlines, the rose and bitlines are the um.
Speaker 1: So that's the grid on on the flash memory. Uh
Speaker 1: so yeah, I mean, and the data there's is not
Speaker 1: stored in the same way. Again, since we're talking about
Speaker 1: electron gates as opposed to magnetic, so it's not like
Speaker 1: it's spread out throughout the drive the same way that
Speaker 1: it is on hard disks. Um, it's uh, it's an
Speaker 1: interesting and that that's all. Might also be why when
Speaker 1: you're accessing stuff from like a flash based memory system
Speaker 1: it seems to pop up much faster. It's because it's
Speaker 1: not having to search multiple locations within the drive to
Speaker 1: find all the bits of that file. Well, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just it's it's nice to see it coming down
Speaker 1: in price because I think it will become more common
Speaker 1: in computers. But like I said, don't assume that your
Speaker 1: information is completely safe. It's always a good idea to
Speaker 1: back everything up. Yeah, yeah, whether you're using another platter
Speaker 1: system hard drive to do it, or a flash based system,
Speaker 1: or you're storing to the cloud. If you're storing to
Speaker 1: the cloud, then you don't know what kind of system
Speaker 1: ultimately is going to be holding that data, nor do
Speaker 1: you know exactly where it is as you control the
Speaker 1: other end of that. But there is a physical system
Speaker 1: somewhere holding it. It's not like it's not like it's
Speaker 1: literally floating in the web and is just kind of
Speaker 1: free roaming until you access it. It's not quite true.
Speaker 1: It actually is sitting on someone's machine somewhere that's right
Speaker 1: blinking ominously in the night. Yeah. Well that wraps up
Speaker 1: this discussion about hard drives. I thought perhaps we should
Speaker 1: address something that came to us from a little listener
Speaker 1: mail and Chris, I think you have this, Yes, yes, um,
Speaker 1: this happened. Well, Jonathan was out on a vacation. We
Speaker 1: just record the iPhone for podcast that everybody had been
Speaker 1: emailing us about, and I made a misstatement and Stephen
Speaker 1: wrote in to correct me. Thank you very much, Stephen, because,
Speaker 1: as he wrote, the Nexus one is only G s
Speaker 1: M with different three G frequencies for eight T and
Speaker 1: T and T Mobile, please correct. And the name of
Speaker 1: his subject line was angry yelling, so I'm assuming he
Speaker 1: was speaking to me an angry voice of doing voice
Speaker 1: to text. And it's amazing it didn't all come out
Speaker 1: in all caps. Well, as it turns out, he was
Speaker 1: absolutely right. The last time I had looked at Google's
Speaker 1: Nexus one page, they were still planning a version for
Speaker 1: Verizon but launch yes, Spring two thousand. Yes, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know what, I hadn't been back to the page
Speaker 1: in quite some time, and he's absolutely right. They have
Speaker 1: shelve those plans. Yeah, because the Droid came out and
Speaker 1: that ended up, Verizon decided that they would just back
Speaker 1: the Droid line and various other Android phones and they
Speaker 1: would not carry the Nexus one line. Yes, so thank
Speaker 1: you very much Stephen for calling me out on that
Speaker 1: because I was absolutely incorrect and clearly I was not
Speaker 1: paying attention being the Android fan boy on this podcast. Yes,
Speaker 1: he would have thrown something at me if he had
Speaker 1: been watching I was. I was probably looking at my
Speaker 1: notes trying to find wordline. At any rate, Thanks again.
Speaker 1: If any of you have any comments, criticisms, corrections, requests,
Speaker 1: you just want to tell us that we're doing awesome job,
Speaker 1: you can write us. Our email address is tex Stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff Worse dot com and Chris and I
Speaker 1: will talk to you again really soon. If you're a
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