Comment by dunmalg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dunmalg | Hacker News Reader

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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?

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/...

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.

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