Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the tech are you? I received a request
Speaker 1: to talk about flash memory from a hardware engineer, musician,
Speaker 1: and self described total nerd via the I heart Radio
Speaker 1: app talk back feature. Uh. That's that little microphone icon
Speaker 1: you would see if you were to navigate to the
Speaker 1: tech Stuff podcast page on the I heart Radio app.
Speaker 1: If you click on that, you can leave a voice
Speaker 1: message up to thirty seconds long there, and if you
Speaker 1: want me to include the audio in an episode, you
Speaker 1: can let me know. I always prefer opt in rather
Speaker 1: than opt out. This particular voice message did not ask
Speaker 1: for it to be used in an episode, so I'm
Speaker 1: just leaving it out to be on the safe side.
Speaker 1: But let's talk about flash memory now. One thing that
Speaker 1: we need to clear up is when we talk about
Speaker 1: flash memory, we're typically talking about data storage, you know,
Speaker 1: like like a hard drive, rather than talking about something
Speaker 1: like traditional computer memory like RAM. RAM stands for random
Speaker 1: access memory. Computer memory, as we typically define it means
Speaker 1: a temporary storage system that holds data and instructions that
Speaker 1: a CPU or central processing unit needs when it's running
Speaker 1: a particular process. Computer memory is what saves a processor
Speaker 1: from having to retrieve specific information from long term storage
Speaker 1: over and over and Without RAM, computers would be much
Speaker 1: much slower than they are. And it's why some folks
Speaker 1: will say that one way to speed up your computer
Speaker 1: is to add more memory. It actually gets way more
Speaker 1: complicated than that, though, and I'm sure I'll talk about
Speaker 1: that in another episode. Maybe I'll do an episode about
Speaker 1: the the components in your machine that determine how quickly
Speaker 1: it runs, because there's a lot of There are a
Speaker 1: lot of factors, it's not just one thing. Also, one
Speaker 1: way that folks will describe RAM versus storage is the
Speaker 1: kind of think of it like human short term memory
Speaker 1: versus long term memory. We use short term memory to
Speaker 1: handle something that's going on in the moment, such as
Speaker 1: let's say you meet someone for the first time, and
Speaker 1: they introduce themselves and they give you their name, so
Speaker 1: you use their name as you talk to them. We
Speaker 1: then commit important stuff to long term memory so that
Speaker 1: we can pull from that should we ever need to,
Speaker 1: like remembering that person's name when you see them at
Speaker 1: a function three years later. Then you don't want to
Speaker 1: look like a total jerk. By the way, I am
Speaker 1: really bad at long term memory. I'm not great at
Speaker 1: short term either. As it turns out, I kind of
Speaker 1: live in the moment. It's like the world is just
Speaker 1: constantly new and amazing to me. That's the way I
Speaker 1: prefer to think of it, rather than I him really
Speaker 1: bad at remembering people's names. But flash memory typically behaves
Speaker 1: more like a hard drive than RAM does. It's a
Speaker 1: way to store information for more of a long term solution.
Speaker 1: Flash drives are also known as solid state storage devices UH.
Speaker 1: They use an all electronic method to store data, as
Speaker 1: opposed to traditional hard drives, which have moving parts like
Speaker 1: platters and read right heads. Also, flash drives are non
Speaker 1: volatile forms of storage. That means that the data stored
Speaker 1: on a flash drive is going to stay there even
Speaker 1: if the computer that the drive is is connected to
Speaker 1: has been switched off. Stuff in RAM is volatile, so
Speaker 1: information stored in RAM is volatile. Memory that are volatile data.
Speaker 1: That means that information will go by by when you
Speaker 1: power your computer down. RAM requires power to continue to
Speaker 1: store information. That's not the case with flash storage. Or
Speaker 1: flash memory. Like a traditional hard drive, a flash drive
Speaker 1: will jealously cling onto that precious data. It just does
Speaker 1: so in a different way from traditional hard drives. All right,
Speaker 1: So let's do a quick rundown of how traditional hard
Speaker 1: drives work so that we can make this distinction. Now,
Speaker 1: I mentioned that a traditional hard drive has a platter
Speaker 1: and a read right head, so you can kind of
Speaker 1: think of it similar to a turntable or record player
Speaker 1: and vinyl records. Only imagine that your turntable is able
Speaker 1: to not just play music on a record, it can
Speaker 1: also record music to a blank record. Now, with vinyl records,
Speaker 1: we record information in grooves, and a stylist or needle
Speaker 1: travels through that groove, and the physical vibrations the grooves
Speaker 1: transferred to that stylus get transformed into an electric signal
Speaker 1: thanks to a tiny electro magnet that then can be
Speaker 1: amplified and sent to speakers, and then we get playback.
Speaker 1: With traditional hard drive, we're not talking about physical grooves. Instead,
Speaker 1: we're using the read right head, which is able to
Speaker 1: generate and detect magnetic fields, so it can align magnetic
Speaker 1: particles that are on the hard disk platter, and those
Speaker 1: particles based on their alignment, can represent zeros and ones,
Speaker 1: you know, bits, the basic language of computers. This, by
Speaker 1: the way, is why you may have heard that you
Speaker 1: should keep powerful magnets away from computers. If that computer
Speaker 1: relies on any type of magnetic storage, a powerful magnet
Speaker 1: could change the alignment of the particles on that platter,
Speaker 1: and that would destroy the data stored on it. You
Speaker 1: could do that on purpose too, in an effort to
Speaker 1: make an old hard drive unreadable, you know, to conceal
Speaker 1: whatever had been stored on the drive. We call this degassing,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's an important step. If you were to
Speaker 1: ever like retire a computer and you want to maybe
Speaker 1: donate it, or sell it or or give it away,
Speaker 1: chances are you want to make sure that anything that
Speaker 1: you had stored on that computer is well and truly gone.
Speaker 1: You don't want it to resurface at some point. It
Speaker 1: might have some sensitive information on there, So that's one
Speaker 1: reason you might want to decoss an old computer. But
Speaker 1: flash drives don't use magnetism to store data, So you
Speaker 1: could bring a powerful magnet near a solid state drive
Speaker 1: and you would not change a single bit of data
Speaker 1: that's stored on that device. So a flash or solid
Speaker 1: state drive isn't susceptible to the gossing. That's good and bad.
Speaker 1: It's bad only if you're trying to come up with
Speaker 1: a way to prevent someone from retrieving data that was
Speaker 1: once stored on that flash drive. You would have to
Speaker 1: take a different approach in order to do that. Now,
Speaker 1: the listener who left this request and my apologies but
Speaker 1: I don't actually have your name, mentioned that he was
Speaker 1: familiar with flash from ages back and referred to I
Speaker 1: PROM Now I'm assuming he means e E p R
Speaker 1: O M, but he could have meant E E p
Speaker 1: R O M will cover both. So E E p
Speaker 1: r O M stands for electronically eraseable programmable read only memory,
Speaker 1: and it is kind of a forerunner to flash. It's
Speaker 1: sort of the foundation that flash would be built upon,
Speaker 1: although the two are distinct. So let's talk about read
Speaker 1: only memory for a second because it's that's also important. Now,
Speaker 1: I already mentioned RAM, that's random access memory. RAM is
Speaker 1: volatile and it is rewriteable, meaning you can read or
Speaker 1: overwrite data stored in RAM as much as you like.
Speaker 1: Read Only memory or ROM is different, as the name indicates,
Speaker 1: you usually can only read data from a ROM storage
Speaker 1: source like a WRAM micro chip, but you aren't typically
Speaker 1: able to write new data to a ROM. With computers,
Speaker 1: we usually find very important basic level process is stored
Speaker 1: in ROMs, such as the boot sequence for a computer,
Speaker 1: so that your machine goes through all the necessary steps
Speaker 1: to swing into working order. You wouldn't want to overwrite
Speaker 1: that stuff. These are the most basic instructions needed to
Speaker 1: make the machine work. If you're in the main or
Speaker 1: multi arcade machine emulator scene, you might think of ROMs
Speaker 1: as the code for a specific arcade game. In the
Speaker 1: old days of arcades, manufacturers would program games on actual microchips.
Speaker 1: The game was never meant to change, and so programming
Speaker 1: them on rom's made perfect sense. So if you were
Speaker 1: to open up one of those classic arcade machines, you
Speaker 1: would find circuit boards holding various chips, and that, in
Speaker 1: fact would be the game. It's not from a disk
Speaker 1: or anything like that, unless you're talking about a game
Speaker 1: like Dragons Layer, which in fact used laser desk technology.
Speaker 1: But that's beside the point, and those games were stored
Speaker 1: on read only memory. However, e E PROM E PROM
Speaker 1: also includes the allotronically erasable programmable part. Right, So clearly
Speaker 1: I PROM is not exactly like traditional ROM. It is
Speaker 1: user modifiable. Users can erase and reprogram individual bytes of
Speaker 1: data stored on I PROM. This in itself was an
Speaker 1: evolution of single E E PROM E P R O
Speaker 1: M that was just eraseable programmable read only memory and listener.
Speaker 1: If this is what you were referring to, my apologies, Uh,
Speaker 1: it means that you go further back than I anticipated.
Speaker 1: So uh, E PROM actually was another form of PROM
Speaker 1: that's programmable read only memory. You might wonder what's the
Speaker 1: difference between E PROM with a single E and e
Speaker 1: PROM with a double E, and it really is that
Speaker 1: electronically eraseable part. So with the old e PROM chips
Speaker 1: one E, you could technically erase data that was stored
Speaker 1: on that chip. However, to do so, you first had
Speaker 1: to expose the chip to ultra violet light for a
Speaker 1: good long while, like an hour. So imagine having to
Speaker 1: wait an hour in order to erase data that was
Speaker 1: stored on a chip so that you could write over
Speaker 1: it again. Obviously, that would not be viable for your
Speaker 1: average user. Data on a double E e PROM, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, could be erased by applying a slightly
Speaker 1: higher than normal electrical voltage to the chip. Now, as
Speaker 1: you might imagine, that's way less work than exposing a
Speaker 1: chip to ultra violet light, and it made e PROM
Speaker 1: storage viable for specific applications, not yet to the point
Speaker 1: of a solid state drive. Now, before I jump into
Speaker 1: what makes flash work, remember flash is kind of an
Speaker 1: evolution of e PROM. But let's let's talk about the
Speaker 1: history of flash. So i PROM dates back a few decades,
Speaker 1: and flash we can actually trace back to the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. Dr Fugio Massuoka, who was working for Tashiba,
Speaker 1: developed flash memory. Masuoka said that the name flash was
Speaker 1: actually suggested by a colleague, Mr. Shoji are Zumi, because
Speaker 1: Razumi felt that the process of a racing store data
Speaker 1: off the the flash method was very similar to an
Speaker 1: old school cameras flash. Now, I suspect that some of
Speaker 1: you all out there might not have had that much
Speaker 1: experience with flash cameras because everyone's using their phones, and
Speaker 1: I mean some people have like the little led flash
Speaker 1: on their phones. But it's totally different from the old
Speaker 1: flash cameras, which used capacitors to generate a very quick,
Speaker 1: very bright flash of light when you were taking a
Speaker 1: picture in low light situations. And flash cameras used to
Speaker 1: be huge, and of course they still are being used
Speaker 1: in some settings, like professionals of course still use them,
Speaker 1: but a lot of I think a lot of the
Speaker 1: average people out there probably have had limited access to
Speaker 1: them if they are below a certain age. I'm of
Speaker 1: an age where I remember flash being like just standard
Speaker 1: on cameras, like you really needed it or else. Any
Speaker 1: picture you took indoors was not going to come out properly. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the actual methodology for storing data on a flash drive
Speaker 1: was really clever. I'll talk about that more after we
Speaker 1: come back from this break. Okay, let's talk about how
Speaker 1: flash data is stored in the first place. Imagine you
Speaker 1: have a grid, so you've got columns and you've got rows.
Speaker 1: Each box in this grid, each cell within that grid
Speaker 1: has two transistors located at each of the intersections around it.
Speaker 1: One of those transistors is what we would call a
Speaker 1: floating gate transistor, which holds a charge inside it. The
Speaker 1: other is a metal oxide silicon or moss transistor and
Speaker 1: serves as the control gate. Uh now, I guess I'm
Speaker 1: gonna need to talk about gates. As we're using floating
Speaker 1: gate and control gate. That doesn't really mean anything unless
Speaker 1: you dive a little further in. So gates are really
Speaker 1: that's shorthand for logic gates, and this serves as the
Speaker 1: foundation for any circuitry system uh, specifically digital systems. So
Speaker 1: with a logic gate, you've got a circuit that at
Speaker 1: least has at least one input, and it can have
Speaker 1: more than one, but has at least one, and it
Speaker 1: has only a single output. And what is being input
Speaker 1: and output in this case, well, we're talking electric charges. Uh.
Speaker 1: These circuits provide specific functions which we designate with names
Speaker 1: like and or not nor nand and so on. Those
Speaker 1: names tell us how the gates behave and the output
Speaker 1: that they will produce based upon the type of input
Speaker 1: coming into the gate. For example, a simple and gate
Speaker 1: might have two inputs and will refer to these inputs
Speaker 1: as input A and input B, and it has a
Speaker 1: single output. Remember all gates have a single output we'll
Speaker 1: call the output X. There are four possible scenarios with
Speaker 1: this gate, which we will represent using binary data or bits.
Speaker 1: That's that is, zeros and ones. So instead of talking
Speaker 1: about electric charges. We're gonna talk about feeding zeros and
Speaker 1: ones to a logic gate through its inputs and what
Speaker 1: is generated as an output. Now you've got your and
Speaker 1: logic gate, and let's say that you feed zeros to
Speaker 1: both input A and input B. Well, and AND gate
Speaker 1: will then produce a zero as the output. So output
Speaker 1: X will generate a zero. Now let's say that you
Speaker 1: feed a zero to input A and a one to
Speaker 1: input B to your hand gate. Well, the X output
Speaker 1: will still be zero. In fact, the only way that
Speaker 1: the X will equal one is if both A and
Speaker 1: B inputs are ones. That's why it's called an and gate.
Speaker 1: The gate produces a one if all inputs going into
Speaker 1: the gate are also ones. And remember like we're talking
Speaker 1: about a simple example here where we have two inputs,
Speaker 1: but you could have more than two inputs going into
Speaker 1: a single gate, but it would have to be all
Speaker 1: ones going into that gate for the gate to produce
Speaker 1: a one. On the other side, with flash drives, we're
Speaker 1: talking about NOR or nand architectures, So a NOR gate
Speaker 1: will only produce a one if all inputs going into
Speaker 1: the gate are at zero. So if input A zero
Speaker 1: input via zero, then x will equal one. But with
Speaker 1: any other combination, like if you have all ones or
Speaker 1: a combination of zeros and ones going in as input,
Speaker 1: the output is going to be a zero. A nand
Speaker 1: gate is a not and gate. This will produce a
Speaker 1: one out put in every single case, except when all
Speaker 1: inputs are ones. So if you've got two or more
Speaker 1: zeros going into a nand gate, you're gonna get a
Speaker 1: one coming out. If you get a combination of ones
Speaker 1: and zeros, you're gonna get a one coming out. If
Speaker 1: all the inputs are ones, you get a zero coming out. Now,
Speaker 1: these are the functions gates can serve, and you can
Speaker 1: actually program stuff by creating all these different logic gates
Speaker 1: in a various series in order to produce particular you know, outcomes.
Speaker 1: But let's talk about the gates themselves. So we're talking
Speaker 1: about transistors here. The transistors and electric circuits can serve
Speaker 1: as a type of switch, either allowing data to pass
Speaker 1: through or not. On one side of the transistor, you
Speaker 1: have the source that is the place where input is
Speaker 1: coming from, and on the other side of the gate,
Speaker 1: you have the drain that's the place where the output
Speaker 1: is going to. With a standard moss fat transistor. A
Speaker 1: moss FET stands for metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor.
Speaker 1: You would open the gate or you know, turn the
Speaker 1: switch on by placing a charge on the gates electrode.
Speaker 1: That would turn the semiconductor transistor into a conductor and
Speaker 1: allow electricity to flow through. Removing the charge from that
Speaker 1: electrode makes the semiconductor transistor behave like an insulator. That's
Speaker 1: the big deal with transistors. They can, depending on the situation,
Speaker 1: act either as a conductor or insulator. They can either
Speaker 1: allow a charge to move through or prevent it. All right, Now,
Speaker 1: let's talk about a floating gate transistor that has an
Speaker 1: extra piece to it. The floating gate is electrically isolated
Speaker 1: from the rest of the transistor. That isolation is key
Speaker 1: because it means once you store a charge in a
Speaker 1: floating gate, that charge will stay there. And that's because
Speaker 1: the floating gate isn't connected to a drain where the
Speaker 1: charge could otherwise go. This gets a bit tricky to
Speaker 1: explain without visual aids, but I'll give it a go.
Speaker 1: All right, So with a flash drive, we've got your
Speaker 1: control gate, and we've got your floating gate, and an
Speaker 1: intersection in this grid of rows and columns. The rows
Speaker 1: of the grid are the word line, and the word
Speaker 1: line goes through the control gate. With that link, the
Speaker 1: cell and flash memory holds the value of one, so
Speaker 1: by default, all the cells in flash memory are set
Speaker 1: to one, not to zero. To change any cell to
Speaker 1: the value of zero, you actually have to put in
Speaker 1: some work. So the rows are the word line. What
Speaker 1: then are the columns, Well, that's called the bitline. The
Speaker 1: bitline can carry a charge to the floating gate by
Speaker 1: pushing the charge through at a slightly higher voltage than
Speaker 1: what is used for the control gate. That's enough for
Speaker 1: electrons to bridge the gap of the otherwise isolated floating gate,
Speaker 1: and the floating gate will then hold a negative of charge.
Speaker 1: Because electrons are negatively charged sub atomic particles, and this
Speaker 1: process is called the Fouler nord Heim tunneling process. The
Speaker 1: collection of electrons in the floating gate then becomes kind
Speaker 1: of a negatively charged force field between the floating gate
Speaker 1: and the control gate. A cell sensor monitors how much
Speaker 1: charge passes through the floating gate, and if the flow
Speaker 1: is above a certain threshold, the value of the cell
Speaker 1: is interpreted as a one. If the value is below
Speaker 1: this threshold, the value within the cell is considered to
Speaker 1: be zero. So another way to think about it is
Speaker 1: that if the cell conducts a current, it's representing one.
Speaker 1: If it is acting more like an insulator, it's representing
Speaker 1: a zero. To return the cell value to one, you
Speaker 1: have to apply a higher voltage electric field to the cell.
Speaker 1: And really this process typically targets sections of the flash
Speaker 1: memory called blocks, particularly for the type of flash memory
Speaker 1: that we who's frequently um and sometimes you might even
Speaker 1: have to target the entire flash chip itself and boiled down.
Speaker 1: By controlling the voltage to the control and floating gates
Speaker 1: of the transistors on the solid state drive, you can
Speaker 1: create the zeros that represent the data. Remember it's by
Speaker 1: default it's set at one, So really creating zeros is
Speaker 1: what is writing data to that. Otherwise you just have,
Speaker 1: you know, a block of ones. So erasing flash memory
Speaker 1: really just means turning all the cells within the memory
Speaker 1: to one, and writing to flash memory really just turning
Speaker 1: means turning selective cells to zero. So let's say you're
Speaker 1: starting off with a bite of blank flash memory. Uh,
Speaker 1: that would be eight ones. So a bite is eight bits, right,
Speaker 1: and we've established that a blank cell is a cell
Speaker 1: that's holding a one within it. Let's say you want
Speaker 1: to write a bite that is actually zero followed by
Speaker 1: seven ones. You could theoretically keep writing to that same bite.
Speaker 1: You could change you could reprogram that byte by changing
Speaker 1: other ones in that series to zeros over time. You
Speaker 1: could not, however, change in these zeros back to ones
Speaker 1: without erasing the entire byte, really, without erasing the entire
Speaker 1: block that the bite is on. So you could write
Speaker 1: data in the form of zero one zero one, zero
Speaker 1: one zero one, but you could not then go back
Speaker 1: to zero followed by seven ones without first erasing everything
Speaker 1: and starting over. It gets a little confusing. Don't worry,
Speaker 1: it will get more confusing. I should also mention there's
Speaker 1: also flash RAM. But that's the type of volatile memory,
Speaker 1: meaning if it does lose power, then any information stored
Speaker 1: within that memory is lost. This is the type of
Speaker 1: memory found in things like car radio systems, where you've
Speaker 1: maybe stored preset radio stations and such. So you might think,
Speaker 1: but my radio stations stay on even after I'm you know,
Speaker 1: turn off the car and I get out and do whatever.
Speaker 1: But when your car is off, that system is still
Speaker 1: drawing a very tiny amount of power from your car's
Speaker 1: battery in order to maintain those settings. However, if your
Speaker 1: vehicle were to totally lose power, like let's say you
Speaker 1: had the battery completely removed, then you would lose that
Speaker 1: data and you would have to reset all your favorite stations. Okay,
Speaker 1: when we come back, we'll get into a little bit
Speaker 1: more detail about NAND versus NOR architectures, because flash comes
Speaker 1: in both, and we'll talk a bit more about how
Speaker 1: flash is organized by architecture. Uh trust me, it actually
Speaker 1: is really interesting. It does get a bit complicated, don't worry.
Speaker 1: I'm here with you every step of the way. But
Speaker 1: first let's take a quick break. Okay. I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: that flash typically comes in NAND and NOR architect ictures,
Speaker 1: and the NAND architecture is the one most of us
Speaker 1: have experience with. It's the type of memory used for
Speaker 1: SD cards, USB flash drives, and computer solid state drives.
Speaker 1: NOR is usually used for storing digital configuration information. Uh
Speaker 1: nand flash has transistors in grid wired in series. NOR
Speaker 1: flash has its transistors or cells wired in parallel. That
Speaker 1: architecture does matter because with NOR you can actually program
Speaker 1: at the bite level. You can write and rewrite at
Speaker 1: the bite level. When nand you have to do it
Speaker 1: at a much larger level, which we'll get to in
Speaker 1: a second. And we're gonna stick with nand because again
Speaker 1: that's the type most of us interact with regularly. The
Speaker 1: organization of a nand flash drive goes with cell, which
Speaker 1: is your individual unit in which you know you're storing
Speaker 1: either a zero or a one one by default. Next,
Speaker 1: you have strings, and as that name suggests, a string
Speaker 1: is a series of cells that are connected to one another,
Speaker 1: where the source of one cell connects to the drain
Speaker 1: of the next cell. One level up from strings, and
Speaker 1: you have pages. So a page is a collection of strings.
Speaker 1: A collection of pages makes up a block, and a
Speaker 1: collection of blocks connected through the same bitline makes a plane. Finally,
Speaker 1: you've got the flash dye, which consists of one of
Speaker 1: or more planes, plus all the components that allow the
Speaker 1: drive to write, erase, and read data in those cells. Now,
Speaker 1: this arrangement allows the drive to read and write on
Speaker 1: a page level. So that's as far down as the
Speaker 1: read right functions go as to the level of page. Remember,
Speaker 1: you have cells, strings, then pages, so read write is
Speaker 1: at the page level, and if you want to do
Speaker 1: a race, you actually have to go up to the
Speaker 1: level of a block. So to erase data from a
Speaker 1: flash drive, you work in blocks. So let's say you've
Speaker 1: got some data that's stored within a block, and there's
Speaker 1: technically room for more data to be stored there, right,
Speaker 1: So let's say that half of that block is filled
Speaker 1: but the other half is available. Well, you want to
Speaker 1: add more information to that block, but in order to
Speaker 1: do that, you can't just write the information to the
Speaker 1: end of the block. You would first need to erase
Speaker 1: the block. So the way this actually works is that
Speaker 1: first you would have a different block in the memory
Speaker 1: which has been untouched. All the cells are set to one,
Speaker 1: so that block is effectively blank. You would actually copy
Speaker 1: over the information in the partially filled block and you
Speaker 1: would store it in the new block, and then you
Speaker 1: would add in the new data that you wanted to
Speaker 1: say at the end of that. So it's like you're writing.
Speaker 1: You're rewriting stuff that was already there and then writing
Speaker 1: the new information at end of it. The old block,
Speaker 1: the one you pulled from the one you copied, can
Speaker 1: then be erased. All the cells can be reset to one.
Speaker 1: Now this sounds messy, but I should add that when
Speaker 1: I say you have to do this, it's not actually
Speaker 1: you doing it, it's the computer. One drawback of flash
Speaker 1: memory is that it can wear out over time. It's
Speaker 1: not as big a deal now as it used to be,
Speaker 1: and it never was a huge deal, but it was
Speaker 1: something that you had to keep in mind. So you
Speaker 1: have a finite number of a race and right cycles
Speaker 1: or program a race cycles, also known as PE cycles.
Speaker 1: See when I think of PE cycles, I think of
Speaker 1: grade school and having to exercise. But no, over over time,
Speaker 1: the cells will wear out and they won't hold a
Speaker 1: written block of data properly. You can kind of think
Speaker 1: of it in the way that um that batteries have
Speaker 1: recharge cycles, and I have a limited number of those, right,
Speaker 1: Like a battery capacity to hold a charge decreases over time,
Speaker 1: and the more times you discharge and recharge a battery,
Speaker 1: the closer you get to that that level where the
Speaker 1: amount of energy it can store is no longer sufficient.
Speaker 1: Same sort of thing with flash drives. But again, these days,
Speaker 1: flash has advanced to a point where it's likely that
Speaker 1: other components in your system are gonna wear out or
Speaker 1: break before you ever have to worry about running up
Speaker 1: against the limitations of flash memory. Um. And that's for
Speaker 1: two reasons. One, the design of flash memory has improved
Speaker 1: over time so that they can withstand more program erase cycles.
Speaker 1: And two we've also been able to cram way more
Speaker 1: memory into a flash drive over time, and so you
Speaker 1: don't have to erase as often because you've cut so
Speaker 1: much space to use. Now we all know, I mean
Speaker 1: we should all know that when you create more space,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that you suddenly have all the freedom
Speaker 1: in the world. Because if you have space, at some point,
Speaker 1: you're gonna find ways to fill it, right, Like I
Speaker 1: remember Bay back in the day when I was very young,
Speaker 1: you know, hearing something about like a computer that would
Speaker 1: come like with a two D fifty six megabyte hard drive,
Speaker 1: and I was, I was, I was boggled. I was like,
Speaker 1: who would ever be able to fill up a hard
Speaker 1: drive that was as massive as two D and fifty
Speaker 1: six megabytes? That's just crazy? And of course that's nothing now, right, Like,
Speaker 1: we don't even think about that being a significant amount
Speaker 1: of storage these days, you know, you probably have programs
Speaker 1: that are far larger than that at the time, I thought, well,
Speaker 1: there's no way, which at this point, it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: how big the drive is. I know that someone's going
Speaker 1: to find a way to fill it up, and probably
Speaker 1: way faster than I would anticipate. But these days, if
Speaker 1: you look at solid state drives, you can find them
Speaker 1: in the terabyte range. Right, They're holding terabytes of data
Speaker 1: and these things can be really small. It's fascinating to
Speaker 1: me how we've developed this technology. Uh. And it's due
Speaker 1: to things like the manturization of transistors that it's even possible,
Speaker 1: along with the improvement in architecture, so that you could
Speaker 1: have this very dense storage system and a very small
Speaker 1: form factor. Uh. Phenomenal to me that you can, you know,
Speaker 1: pop onto a store and buy a two terabyte solid
Speaker 1: state drive. Now, there are other benefits to solid state
Speaker 1: drives too. Hard drives. You know, I mentioned before that
Speaker 1: they are not prone to being a race if you
Speaker 1: happen to be, you know, close to a large magnet.
Speaker 1: But there are other big benefits as well. A solid
Speaker 1: state drive has no moving parts in it, so it's
Speaker 1: not as delicate as a hard drive is. A hard
Speaker 1: drive like a mechanical shock, as in dropping it and
Speaker 1: having it land on the floor. That could be enough
Speaker 1: to break it. Right. It could unaligned the platter so
Speaker 1: the platter is no longer in the proper plane, which
Speaker 1: means it won't turn properly. It could damage the red
Speaker 1: right head. You could do physical damage to a hard
Speaker 1: drive relatively easily. I say relatively because I used to
Speaker 1: have an MP three player that had a physical hard
Speaker 1: drive in it, and goodness knows, I dropped it a
Speaker 1: couple of times and I was just fortunate that it
Speaker 1: was made exceedingly well and UM didn't immediately break the
Speaker 1: hard drive. But yes, solid state drives are much more
Speaker 1: resistant to physical damage than hard drives are. They're also
Speaker 1: way faster because again, you don't have moving parts. You
Speaker 1: don't have to spin a platter up to beat and
Speaker 1: move the read right head to the proper physical location
Speaker 1: on the platter to read the information. UM. For that reason,
Speaker 1: you know, gamers really like solid state drives because games
Speaker 1: will load much more quickly. You'll be able to load
Speaker 1: information from the drive to memory to be processed faster
Speaker 1: than you would with a physical hard drive. Again, when
Speaker 1: we start talking about what is it in your computer
Speaker 1: that makes it faster or slower drive. Drive type is
Speaker 1: one of those factors, not necessarily the most important one,
Speaker 1: but it is one of the factors. So I guess
Speaker 1: I will do an episode. Maybe next week, I'll try
Speaker 1: and do an episode about what are the things that
Speaker 1: determine how fast or slow your computer is? Uh, because
Speaker 1: I think that would be a fun discussion to have. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's kind of a low down on what flash memory
Speaker 1: is and how it works. Like I said, it gets
Speaker 1: a little complicated to understand without the use of visual aids. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: there are tons of resources out there where you can
Speaker 1: learn more about this, including videos and papers and diagrams
Speaker 1: and such. Um there's an article and how stuff Works
Speaker 1: my old Stomping Grounds that explains how flash memory works.
Speaker 1: All of that can be really useful if you want
Speaker 1: to learn more. I highly recommend you look into it.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for the suggestion. Remember, if you
Speaker 1: want to leave me a suggestion, you can do like
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Speaker 1: talkback feature on I Heart radio app. Go to the
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Speaker 1: thirty seconds and length, or you can reach out to
Speaker 1: me on Twitter, the handle that we use as Text
Speaker 1: Stuff HSW, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
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