The wonderful world of computer memory
Why it just keeps getting bigger in capacity yet smaller in physical size

Have you ever heard of Moore’s law?

Well whether you have or have not, this short clip from ‘Finn Sims Film’ does a great job of summing up one of, if not the most impressive trend in technological evolution.

This principle, trend or driving force (whatever you want to call it!) has a direct effect on all things Flash Drive, from the size of memory to how, in barely a decade, we’ve gone from capacities of mere Megabytes to hundreds of Gigabytes!

From computerworld.com “Data storage is the fastest growing semiconductor technology. Tape storage, hard disk drives and solid state storage have doubled about every 12 to 18 months.”

Now with this huge increase in capacity you would assume that the physical size of a memory chip would increase too? Well you’d be wrong, big time or should that be small time?

“A Dysan Disk Pack from the 1970s with 200MB of capacity weighed 10 pounds. The Disk Pack would be loaded into an IBM 1311 Disk Drive (think washing machine in terms of size). Fast forward to today.

To a Toshiba PCIe 512GB NAND flash drive that you can find in a mobile device. It can achieve a 2Gbps throughput with its four PCIe 2.0 I/O lanes. The drive achieves its enormous capacity through transistors that are about the size of an atom (19 nanometers).”

Thanks for reading this weeks post, stay tuned for another insight into all things USB and beyond!