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Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

Heating flash media can repair the oxide layer, depending upon temperature and duration.

In 2012, research on short bursts of 800°C heat could vastly extend media lifetime. Supposedly 250° for several hours has the same effect (assuming the packaging can withstand it).

In view of the shortages of recent years, we should mandate some form of this technology so we don't waste foundary output on throw-away parts (planned obsolescence).

https://m.hexus.net/tech/news/storage/48893-making-flash-mem...

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>we should mandate some form of this technology so we don't waste foundary output on throw-away parts (planned obsolescence).

That's not planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is INTENTIONALLY rendering a product unusable/undesirable in order to sell more product. A prime example is changing the chapter questions in a college textbook to force new students to buy new books that teach the same thing.

Things that are NOT planned obsolescence but people mistakenly think they are include cheap inkjet printers (they last as long as any reasonable person should expect).... or NOT including an expensive oxide layer regenerating heater in a THUMB DRIVE that's only intended for casual file transfers, not long term storage of frequently changing data.

Ans really, does it make sense to MANDATE a complex heating scheme for flash drives? The way drive capacity and usage continuously scales upwards, old drives would be pointless long before they died. Do you REALLY still use old 32 megabyte flash memory in today's age of terabyte drives?

Knowing about a solution but not implementing it is pretty darn near close intentionally rendering the product undesirable if not exactly that.

For the case of those USB keys: Would you prefer for everyone to bear the seemingly high cost of having such a system, whereas you probably never had a thumb drive fail nor know someone that has ? (You may, but if that's the case you are sadly part of the outliers)

I've had 6 or so USB disks fail inexplicably. Sounds like the proposal is a heater and a timer that are embedded on the stick. That doesn't sound like high cost. I suspect theres a timer and thermometer already on the sticks, that leaves just a heater, which are super cheap.

Failing inexplicably does not mean that it failed because of the issue talked about here. It could as well be bad contacts or soldering whiskers. I'd prefer a USB stick that does not fail too, but in fact, I have never had any fail on me so I don't know the prevalence, and know even less which parts come from this specific issue. Also, if your USB drive starts having a heating element, you need to trust it to not fry everything due to a regulation failure in badly designed units that fail closed. I also doubt a process of heating "at 250 degrees for hours" could be done at 50°. Even of it could, it would literally take days at a time.

> Do you REALLY still use old 32 megabyte flash memory in today's age of terabyte drives?

The tiny ones are great for physical deployment of certificate with key. Takes seconds to do a multi-pass wipe to prepare for the next delivery. Sadly, I wore out the drive I was using this way.

What do you think of the fact that 100K SLC used to be the norm, 2-bit MLC has an endurance of 10K, 3-bit "TLC" (awful misnomer) gets ~1K, and 4-bit "QLC" (even worse misnomer) in the low hundreds from what I've heard (they are very secretive about it)? That's an exponential decrease in reliability for a mere multiplicative increase in capacity.

"The new product stores 4x as much but lasts less than 1/100th as long" doesn't sound good, but that's the reality of what NAND flash industry is like. Meanwhile what little SLC is still available but priced far above what the cost/capacity would suggest, encouraging use of the cheaper and less reliable stuff. Manufacturers playing tricks with things like "SLC cache" and the like. Doesn't that seem suspiciously like planned obolescence?

That 100x longer life span is not useful to most consumers.

Not all consumers have the same use case. I personally enjoy using flash drives for live OS.

I’m sure the market will create endurance drives for those with the need.

If it has I haven't seen it. It wouldn't be true SLC either, just TLC operated in SLC mode.

Neither are paper shopping bags.

Are paper shopping bags cheaper for grocery stores or are they being forced by the government?

Are you really asking that? In EU paper shopping bags are mandated due to environmental reasons https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/27/the-last..., just like longer product lifespan https://www.beuc.eu/press-media/news-events/european-parliam.... None of those are directly beneficial to consumer at the moment of purchase in an obvious way, aka you pay more so almost no one would pick that option on their own accord, but have wide ranging long time ecological and usability ramifications.

It's not so secret.

The intel 670p (using 3D4 QLC) can do 370 TB of writes for the 1 TB model. [1] That makes it terrible for a DB, but perfectly fine for a media server. And other than the limit on total writes, it's overall a good performer at an affordable price. It also does clever things in converting some of QLC to SLC as a variably sized cache, so that smaller, more ephemeral written data doesn't affect it as much. [2]

If you want high endurance, you can get an Optane drive, like [3] which can do 17.52 PB on a similarly sized drive.

[1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/204109/...

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-ssd-670p-m-2-nvme...

[3] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/147529/...

At 250°C, all components would desolder from the PCB. Provided that the components are attached at one side, one would need to be very careful while heating and cooling the device.

> Provided that the components are attached at one side

Unlikely with the tiny size of these devices. I am sure there are tons, but that most will have components on the A and B side. However… the same reasons that this works to assemble in reflow, are the same reasons it MIGHT not be an issue here.

Surface tension keeps the hot upside-down parts where they should be when their solder is molten. So if you have the right conditions, and you have the correct side-up, it should be no more of an issue to reflow a two sided part than a one. This is likely how it was made to begin with, the boards run down the line twice and the second time the upside parts have molten solder.

Obviously there would be issues for things touching components like the enclosure or tape/sticker bridging multiple parts. And fwiw to anyone… you determine “which side is up” by the weight of the components. If one side has a heavy part that won’t be held in place by surface tension, that’s the top side.

I wouldn’t do any of this for some internet-rumor that your drive will last longer, but I do know enough about two sided reflow to offer the above.

Edit: lol classic

If it's not disturbed it could survive this, but ideally you can reduce the temperature just a bit further and increase the time period (though for some processes there is a temperature floor) so you don't liquefy the solder. If you just heat it and don't disturb the surface it should survive, but I'mma have to look up tin oxidation again. It might foam.

Would be interesting to have media with a self-heating cycle.

Playing with temperatures over 150 C on electronic parts is a lottery. Even if they survive, you may get in trouble later.

Perhaps "annealing heaters" could be integrated on-die, and the bursts of heat controlled to be short enough that they don't change the external package temperature much if at all.

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