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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

I see phrases like this "doubles the density of bits stored per unit area versus competing chips, packing in 14.6 gigabits per square millimeter. Its 1-terabit chips are bundled into 2-terabyte packages, each of which is barely more than a centimeter on a side" and I just imagine sending this sentence back to my 12 year old self, sitting in front of my Commodore VIC-20 and imagine how science fiction that would sound.

I mean, it sounds science fiction to me now. Amazing.

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And affordable for common people.

I remember tiny “spy cameras” being a movie trope, now everyone has one in their pocket.

Yeah, human technological progress has come a long way!

The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast, and the joy found in such novelties tends to be fleeting and quickly fade as it becomes just another normal part of everyday life we take for granted (e.g. fancy new tech, or really anything new and nice). I like to frequently reflect on how amazing it is I am alive and even exist at all!

Gratitude is truly the only effective counterdefense I've found to reduce the fade of true joys in life, like my friends and family.

I have a different stance, I go frugal and away from tech. Because at some point I become confused by the quantities involved and the lack of joy.

What is truly amazing is all our devices have been hampered by copyright laws and competing interests. On my iPhone I can’t load a YouTube song then switch over to Snapchat and start a video call while listening to that song. That is just one example. There are many many more. But we have been trained to thing <40% is the normal. This is why for years I followed the jailbreak scene because there was so many cool features one could get by jailbreaking that just wasn’t offered to normal users.

> The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast, and the joy found in such novelties tends to be fleeting and quickly fade as it becomes just another normal part of everyday life

The good (?) news is that this also works in reverse. So if we ever suffer a serious downgrade in living standards it’s not a serious issue. We’ll get used to it in no time :)

Does it? I get painfully nostalgic even about stuff that was objectively worse, don't even want to try to imagine how it must be with things that were better.

I get nostalgic too, but it's about my once young age that is forever in the past.

Well, we just had a global experiment wherein people all over world suddenly had to adjust their lives in a major way, and I think we came through alright.

I think you forgot a /s. A lot of people's mental health diminished quite a bit the past few years.

> The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast, and the joy found in such novelties tends to be fleeting and quickly fade as it becomes just another normal part of everyday life we take for granted

This is why I am not afraid automation is going to render us without jobs. We're going to get accustomed with better, and still need to work. AI exponential increase can't keep up with human entitlement.

> still need to work

Us needing to work does not meant that the jobs will still be there for us to work at.

The reason so much money goes into automation is simply because it cuts the payroll. The argument that there have always been jobs in the past, so there will always be jobs in the future, simply does not follow..

There will always be jobs, their nature will just be different. Even if you make the machines, someone has to design them, program them and set them up. And even if we automate the automating, we will still be able to create art and as long as it brings any value to others, it will be worth paying for, making it good old work.

Companies want automation for many more reasons besides cost cutting:

- latency - respond sooner to a request

- speed - work faster

- volume - produce more

- scalability - just deploy more models

- vigilance - the bot doesn't get tired and start making mistakes

- consistency - the bot does things one way, many people do things in many ways

- fewer human problems - no cutting corners, slacking off, office politics, etc

- lower environmental footprint

- increased work safety

- improved tracking - collect more data to analyse in order to improve your processes

>The human mind acclimates to improvements remarkably fast

I bought a Fitorch P25 last November. A LED flashlight, runs on a single li-ion cell, costs about $70. Fits in the palm of your hand. It has a light output of three thousand lumens! (A T8 florescent tube, which is four feet long and runs on mains power, does about 2600 lumens.)

It's got a couple brightness modes, which it makes you step through in series, for safety. At full grunt, if you hold your hand in the beam you have to squint against the glare and you can feel heat on your hand-- all from visible-spectrum photons only, no infrared! It's bright! Of the many warnings silkscreened onto the tube, one needs to be "do not look into flashlight with remaining eye".

I keep it on my desk, to keep me humble. I remember incandescent flashlights, and I remember alkaline batteries. Will my children remember them? Of course not.

I envy you. All I read there was "write endurance and data retention halved again"

I have no idea why you'd read that when the cells are the same size as before.

That outcome would be expected from either decreasing cell size, or increasing bits/cell (what used to be commonly called SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC).

I don't see TFA mentioning either directly, but there are some hints that one of the two (or both) did happen: Number of layers increased from 176 to 232 (that explains 32% increase) but bits/chip area has doubled (total density increased by 100%). Where does the rest of this increase coming from, you reckon?

From a much better Anandtech article: 32% increase in layers, 40% increase in die area.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17509/microns-232-layer-nand-...

A bunch of the cost is test and packaging which is constant so there will be a small cost per bit reduction. But the new chip will cost significantly more to manufacture than a 512Gbit device. No free lunch.

I don't see these as problems as long as software is smart enough.

It merely requires the device to be always powered up (read: has a backup battery that can do periodic flash rewrites for 5 years). And it requires the controller to keep track of the current endurance of every page. A 'worn out' page can still hold data, it just holds either less data, or holds that data for fewer hours before needing to be rewritten.

Long gone are the days of "you can rewrite this data 100,000 times, and then leave it 10 years and it'll still be there". The new normal is "rewrite this data every 20 days to begin with, and after doing 1000 writes you'll need to rewrite the data every hour, or double the ECC bits and then you'll need to rewrite every day".

>or double the ECC bits

Are you aware of even a single ssd product allowing user to reconfigure capacity outside of obtaining secret/proprietary non public manufacturer service software? The only technical way for a drive to automagically shrink size on its own is by starting to mark TRIM freed sectors as BAD and hoping OS running on top will be able to recognize this and transfer BAD status to the filesystem - thats a lot of assumptions. No such drive exists either, drives ship with spare capacity and existence of BAD sectors is treated as a catastrophic event signaling running out of backup NAND.

On SAS disks you can reduce the capacity. I don't know if this has any influence on spare sectors and write cycles though.

You can reserve space by setting host protected area (HPA). There are even people theorizing this might add provisioning are to an SSD https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/SSD_Over-provisioning_u... . But so far there is zero evidence for it. HPA is not a magic nobody touches area, its an area reserved for special superuser use and no Drive will simply start reusing it for its own internal processes.

Drives internally do this with their reserved sectors. They also reallocate sectors between 'fast access' and 'long term storage', where the long term storage uses larger logical pages and hierarchical ECC, allowing a lower percentage of ECC overhead at the cost of performance.

At some point, I wouldn't be surprised if an SSD manufacturer releases a drive with a driver which can reduce the user-visible disk size as it ages. It would probably involve using a 'balloon file', in a similar way to Memory ballooning [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ballooning

You can use hdparm(8)'s --dco-setmax option to reduce the visible size of most SATA drives. This is not particularly useful for single drives — leaving unpartitioned space works just as well, assuming an OS that never writes to it — but it does stop TRIM-ignorant RAID controllers from potentially kneecapping SSD GC by "initializing" intentionally unused space.

Though I imagine most RAID controllers initialize with zeroes, and I hope SSD firmware doesn't reserve flash to store large extents of zeroed sectors, so this shouldn't be terribly useful for underprovisioning purposes. But without extensive testing or access to SSD firmware algorithms, it's hard to say.

This is one layer too high - ssd firmware has no way of knowing your intentions purely from filesystem/sector activity.

Intel SSD DC series https://www.ioncomputer.com/ion/body/documents/over-provisio...

It's amazing to me how you don't consider any of these major drawbacks as problems. The Samsung 840 evo was a disaster and here we are celebrating more of the same.

While I completely agree endurance can - and it is - be managed with software, rewriting data every 20 days is a major, major drawback. To me, it is a regress

We can live with DRAM. Ok. But I cannot have my computer turned off for 3 weeks though? Or I lose data?

Well the SSD should have a built in battery capable of doing whats necessary for years.

Just like your computer has a CMOS battery that's capable of running the clock for years. It's no different. In fact, many computers will refuse to boot if the clock loses time because all the digital certificates on drivers aren't valid yet.

Computer requires battery backup to remain functional. SSD requires backup battery to remain functional. I don't see the difference.

That's an extremely load-bearing "should"; are any current drives shipping like this?

The purpose of these drives is not for archive. In fact, individual SSDs in general should not be used for archiving. They are for performance. Since we're probably talking about laptops or phones typically, there's also the loss of the device or catastrophic failure (fire?) to worry about so there needs to be a disaster recovery plan regardless.

No need for any "archiving". I live in a country where you get drafted for a mandatory army service once you reach 18 years of age. The user leaves his desktop (or laptop) at home, goes to the army, returns back in a year, and — whoops — there's no data left on the drive. You know the user should have kept backups, and I know that, but your average Joe is going to be pretty unpleasantly surprised.

Thats why the drive should have a battery backup builtin lasting many years...

Years of battery life isn't tricky, because the drive can, upon being unpowered for a week, rewrite data to be more durable at the expense of access time. 'recovery blocks' can be created which allow the recovery of any unreadable block on the drive. The drive can then wake up and rewrite data only as often as needed based on temperature and the error rate found on the last rewrite. For example, on a 1TB SSD, you might only rewrite 5GB/day, taking just 10 seconds at 1 watt. On a 5 Wh battery, thats 5 years. And thats a worst case - keep it somewhere cool, and the rewrite rate might be halved, doubling battery life. Have the drive half full, and the battery life is doubled again (due to half as much to rewrite), and multiplied by 8 (due to the ability to use the spare space for ECC data). So a half full drive stored in a cool place might be able to last 160 years. Obviously at that point, the battery self discharge and power to run timers will dominate.

You don't have to go even that far. The minimum hardware requirements for Microsoft Windows 95 were:

A personal computer with a 386DX, 20MHz or higher processor, 4MB of memory (8MB recommended) At least 70MB of available hard disk space for installation

A hard drive at the time, had 250-500MB space. Not even 1GB (that was a luxury), This not even 1/4000 of this small chip. So, you have stack 4000 of those Windows 95 PC Hard Drives, to match the capacity of this chip. Only super computers/clusters of the time had that capacity.

Honestly, what I think is more amazing is how far we didn’t come given the enormous increase in processing power.

Windows 95 was pretty good for it’s time, but windows 11 isn’t essentially different.

Windows from 7 onwards is worse even for 1995.

> windows 11 isn’t essentially different

That's only if you ignore all of the differences! 8)

There are many big and small differences that people just gloss over, because they feel it doesn't apply to them, or they don't even realise it's there.

Windows 95 used to crash if you looked at it wrong. It was horrendously vulnerable to malware, even across the network. Its "maximums" were hilariously low due to many remaining 16-bit internals. Programming for it was a PITA, even in 32-bit mode. Its network capabilities were woeful. Multilingual? Yes, but only in some combinations at a time. No hope of mixing, say, Chinese and Hebrew in a single text box. Poor text input in general, poor accessibility, etc, etc, etc...

Yeah, but would you call all those framework improvements fundamentally different?

It’s more stable, secure, and drivers are plentiful (and included!), but those feel ancillary. Most people don’t need multiple languages in the same text box.

Obviously it’s fundamentally different in a ship of theseus way, in that pretty much all of what was Win 95 has been replaced.

But the way people use their PC is the same.

That's more a people problem than a technology problem. Many user interface paradigms have been tried over the decades. We've largely settled on what we have because it is what people were able to adapt to. Similar to how driving a car isn't that different from 40 years ago, or even 80 years ago. There's minor iterative changes with improved reliability and accessibility, but not fundamental changes.

Except for:

- Kernel was modularized in the MinWin project

- A C++ subset is now used in kernel as well (see WIL library), since Vista

- COM, and now WinRT, took over the role of Longhorn ideas, now done with C++ instead of .NET

- Virtualization is now used to protect key kernel areas (see kernel data protection)

- Focus on user space drivers

- The GUI stack has been rewritten multiple times

One can program Windows 11 like Windows 95, but there are plenty of APIs being missed, it just happens to work thanks to Microsoft's way of dealing with backwards compatibility

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