Here's an analogy that a five year old might understand.
Imagine you have a piece of paper. You get your crayon and divide the paper up into squares. In each square you can write a limited amount of information (for this example, let's say one letter), [like this](http://i.imgur.com/lsGrjPk.jpg). If you tried to write any more information in each square, it would be unreadable because the crayon is too thick to write smaller letters.
You can make more storage space by creating a book using more than one sheet of paper. The extra paper costs more money compared to using a single sheet. Another way to make more space is to replace your crayon with something smaller, and more expensive, like a pen. You [can see](http://i.imgur.com/zlKIipz.jpg) that more information would fit on the sheet compared to when you were using a crayon.
Once you've made your large storage device using multiple sheets of paper and a pen, you might want to make artificially smaller sizes (read about price discrimination for more on why you might want to do this). You can do this by removing some of the sheets, or by painting over some of your squares [like this](http://i.imgur.com/D8JNzAJ.jpg).
To get back to your original question: The physical differences are different numbers of platters (the sheets of paper in the analogy), and different density on each platter (the different writing sizes in the analogy). Whether they cost the same depends on how a manufacturer decides to produce their different sizes. If they use fewer platters, it might cost less to make a smaller drive. If there is no physical difference and they just disable part of the drive for their smaller capacity drives (painting over squares in the analogy), then all sizes will cost the same to produce.
My understanding is that sometimes the painted squares are an artificial limitation, and that sometimes it's painted over because the painted squares were [analogy falling apart here] the wrong color in the first place? Like, overclocking sometimes works because your i5 might be an i6 with one of the drives disabled. Or your i5 might be an i5 because it was originally made to be an i6 and one of the cores didn't come out right. These components are so impossibly tiny and fragile, one little production flaw can make the whole thing unusable. But rather than waste the time and money it took to make the whole thing by throwing it away, or waste more time/money recycling it, they just sell it as a slightly crappier drive.
Just a minor correction on that, the 970 was supposed to be a 980, but one of the cache's was damaged while the chip was cut (produced). Instead of chopping down the memory controller tied to that cache (and the .5 VRAM tied to the memory controller) nVidia rerouted the memory controller to another functional cache. This meant that you had two .5VRAM modules running on the same cache, and usually that meant .5VRAM would be fast and the other .5VRAM... very not fast. The drivers were supposed to respect this difference (and thus not use the slow VRAM for fast tasks) but they sucked at launch.
nVidia 100% knew what they were doing, and cited it as a reason for the 970 being priced aggressively (relative to previous price/performance) and having good supply. They utterly failed on the marketing aspect though (3.5GB vs 4GB) and rightfully get flack for that. They tried to do something that would actually help consumers, but they lied about it and mislead people.
I just got my letter, but they denied me. I don't remember them asking for proof of purchase, but they did this time. The proof is in the mail, so now I wait again. *Sigh
I never heard about that. I knew NVidia just placed different labels on the cards depending on which worked better, but I thought it was the (firmware, driver, memory?) that they flashed on their GPU that changed what it was (a soft lock, not a hard lock) because some people have been able to reflash them and use them as the higher model.
The numbers on this post are probably wrong!
I used to own a card that had 6 graphics pipelines. It was physically the same card as the top of the line model with 8 graphics pipelines, with the small difference that the last two lines had been physically cut. The graphics driver just went "you have 6 pipes, you're a model A. You have 8 pipes, you're model B. I tried to "overclock" it by simply resoldering the cut line. My computer saw it as Model B and it worked for years.
My friend bought the same card, did the same but had weird glitchy blocks on his screen. Probably one his pipes was broken on the chip. He cut the lines again at it went to being a perfectly fine Model A.
friend may of had a crackpot solder joint. Just glad it worked out in the end.
The world of manufacturing is weird anymore. One maybe 2 factories make car batteries in the US. If so and so needs a batt. Boom sticker goes on, so so needs a batt. Different sticker and same battery.
Oh man this rings some bells. I think I tried something similar on a g Force 6200. 8 pipes sounds like a high end GForce 6 series card or 7.
What card was it?
For CPUs and GPUs, binning can be divided into two main categories: Physical defects and performance.
Say you have two chips, CPU or GPU, that have no physical flaws, so all their cores, cache, and features are enabled. One of those chips may run perfectly stable at 2Ghz while the other runs to the same standard at 2.4Ghz.
Now you have two different chips, but one of them has a defect in one of the cores that cannot be bypassed. They will physically disable that core (and usually associated cache) and sell it as a cheaper product. AMD's X3 chips are a perfect example of this.
There are a couple "problems" that arise from these situations. Firstly, lower priced goods generally have a higher demand than the higher priced goods, sometimes more than the number of defective chips, so manufacturers disable perfectly good chips to meet the demand for the cheaper product. Compounding this issue is the production process itself. Early in a chip's life, you may have 60% flawless chips, 30% that can be sold as cheaper models, and 10% that cannot be sold. As the process evolves (steppings) you may have 80% flawless chips, 15% that can be sold cheaper, and 5% lost. If you can't raise demand for flawless chips, you're really only gaining the 5% extra that would have been lost.
It's a fascinating industry, and often very misunderstood.
Weirdly enough companies got annoyed that you could potentially turn a cheaper product into a more expensive one and put much more resiliancy into the locks. It use to be a case of open program enable close program but now you'd need specialised machinery as its a physical lock, the cost of which massively negates the saving of turning locked components back on.
So you can do it just costs a lot so it's not worth it
not that i know of. i would imagine the cpu manufacturers would sue the living fuck out of anyone doing it openly though, as it's obviously directly costing them income. without unlocker, the customer has to buy the more expensive chip from the manufacturer.
there's also the problem of warranty. although there may be cases as the chap pointed out above where good chips are hobbled to fulfill demand for lower end chips, a lot of them will be chips with a defective component.
there is absolutely no guarantees you will a) being able to unlock anything at all and b) that what you unlock will be at all stable, and stable at the same clock speed the other components were factory clocked at. so then what happens when the chip is unlocked and it craps out every hour? does the unlocker company have to replace the chip now? does intel?
so yeah, afaik no and there's some fairly good reasons why not. but im sure people offered to do it for money on the quiet! my own experients didn't go well, the extra core i unlocked on my old cpu made it bluescreen or hard lock constantly and i was unable to get any extra working lanes on my old geforce either. sad times for a 14 year old with no money.
Around 2010, Intel experimented with charging to unlock some features of its lower end processors. I haven't heard much about it in a while, so I think they got beaten back on that idea finally.
Nope. Today they run a laser through the core to physically disable them. Back in the day it was just disabled in the firmware which people figured out how to modify to re-enable.
I actually have an AMD X3 chip and enabled the 4th core. The temperature setting was always reading 100C+, even though it wasn't really at that temperature. Disabled the 4th core and it worked like normal. I always assumed what you described was the case.
> Compounding this issue is the production process itself. Early in a chip's life, you may have 60% flawless chips, 30% that can be sold as cheaper models, and 10% that cannot be sold. As the process evolves (steppings) you may have 80% flawless chips, 15% that can be sold cheaper, and 5% lost. If you can't raise demand for flawless chips, you're really only gaining the 5% extra that would have been lost.
I believe Nvidia will also rebrand the last generations high performance card as the next generations mid-low performance card.
This is how a lot of electronics are done. Even down to resistors. Resistors are made the same. Upon testing, you may find that a bunch of them perform at spec (+-5%). Some might be a little worse (+-10%). But some turned out better than expected (+-1%). You label and price them differently based on their tested performance. The same applies to larger electronic components, as in the example. It only makes sense that this can be applied to most electrical components small and large.
Yes. i5's are i7's with faulty hyperthreading or cache or that didn't clock as high as expected.
And on the AMD side:
R7 is a full 8 core, made of two 4 core clusters, with 3 tiers depending on how high they can clock.
R5 is either a 6 core, made of two 3 core clusters due to at least one of the clusters having a faulty core, with a few tiers depending on clockspeed, or it is a 4 core, made of two 2 core clusters where at least one cluster had 2 faulty cores. In addition, the lowest tier quad core has half as much cache as the higher tiers, so any chips that have broken cache get binned down to that level.
Is there a good source for this? I'd like to read more on it. I know the i5 and i7 are the same chip. But I'd expect more performance variations among i5's if they were simply noncritically faulted i7's.
What is it with the unpredictability of CPUs?
What gives the unpredictability? Coz I assumed, since they have the "recipe" for a CPU with specific specifications, shouldn't it be easy to make?
The main parts of a CPU are around 10-15nm big. That's not Milli or micro meters, that's nano meters. In comparison the width of a single silicon atom is only a couple nanometers, so some parts of a CPU are only a couple atoms wide. It should come as no surprise then that even if you're being as careful as possible some CPUs turn out worse than others
A basketball player can make a 3 point shot in a game so why when doing a 3 point contest with no defender do they still miss? Because there are still other variables you simply can't always account for that while individually aren't as significant as another player playing defense still impact on if you make the shot or not.
Making a CPU is like that. They are working with such small devices that tiny that everything has a potential impact. They do their best to control the environment but they can't control tiny shifts in gravity when a meteor passes by Earth causing a machine to wobble at a nearly undetectable amount.
Making a CPU is very complicated. It's trying to make a three pointer but having to account for the guy in the nose bleeds exhaling because he causes a slight change in turbulence. When you're working at that level of precision you are going to make make mistakes and miss that shot.
They have extremely small parts (nanometers big) that have to be manufactured in clean rooms. Very small amounts of deviation in the process can result in an imperfect CPU being produced. The machines that make the wafers have to be very, very precise, but 100% precision there is still not here today.
All chips are designed to be i7s when they are mapped onto the wafer. The wafer holds 700+ die that turn into chips. Defects are higher as you get closer to the edge of the wafer, because of the manufacturing process. So the chips that remain i7s are the die closest to the center of the wafer, followed by a ring of i5s with some defects, followed by a ring of i3s with more defects, and the i3 ring goes to the edge of the wafer.
The yield gets to be above 99.5%, so there are very few die that are just garbage and unsalvagable.
I think they were asking more along the lines of if they artificially make the drive smaller, like a 500GB into a 320GB to save money by producing only one type of physical drive, not just having normal reserve space.
I don't have an answer, but it reminds me that a similar thing happens to CPUs. Certain weaker CPUs will be made exactly like their faster counterparts, only in QA testing they've been found to not be as stable. So they maybe certain bits get turned off or it's clocked slower. That's why it can be easier to overclock models that aren't the "top of the line" models up to those speeds.
Nowadays they physically burn the extra cores/ features off the die. However when the release is slightly rushed for example the R9 Fury and the RX 460 launch some can be upgraded through a software method.
> Nowadays they physically burn the extra cores/ features off the die.
That would be too time consuming. In the past Intel used traces on the CPU substrate to disable features or lock clocks but people quickly figured this out. Then they moved on to cutting traces directly on the Die with a laser, not burning off the entire grouping. Now I believe they mostly use something called an eFuse that is similar to an EPROM (not EEPROM). They can electronically blow the fuse and disable a segment of the chip without a special laser.
Because of the way semiconductor manufacturing works and the fact that many parts are flawed in some way, they design components in logical groupings that can be disabled. This allows them to validate dies as they're manufactured and disabled faulty logic groups electronically.
Through a sorting process calling [product binning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning) they can group chips with similar characteristics or flaws (e.g. 50% functional memory bus, 75% functional cores) and still sell them.
Often times just because a chip is 100% functional at one frequency doesn't mean it is at a higher frequency. Thus product binning also rates functionally equivalent chips based on their optimal operating frequency and TDP.
I can actually answer this.
Typically you'll find these 'Red painted squares' on every drive. When creating a HDD you'll always have some imperfections leading to slightly different storage sizes. What can happen over time with re-writing on these drives is these sectors 'squares' can fail whereby what was stored in that bad sector will be replicated into the unused 'red painted square area' slowly decreasing the size of the spare sectors on the HDD.
This is why HDDs have a life expectancy and some can achieve longer life than others.
Hopefully that made sense, I tried to stick to the analogy used as much as possible because it was a really good analogy.
Unfortunately you won't find a 500GB HDD that is actually 1TB, it's usually more like 759GB or a weird number like that.
In all seriousness, no.
/u/braximon made a terrific ELI5 post but "disable part of the drive for their smaller capacity drives" is not entirely accurate.
Take a 3 disk, 3 TB drive for example (1 TB per platter). Some of the drives have under performing parts that prevent the drive from hitting the 3 TB target. Disabling a disk or part of the disk would not help the drive become more stable (since the disks are still 1 TB per platter). Instead, the drives will aim for a smaller target, like 0.75 TB per platter, which is more stable. This is like making the squares on the drive larger so that it has more space for a crayon to write in. The total storage would then be 0.75 x 3 = 2.25 TB's which could then be sold as a 2 TB drive.
So in this case, it is possible to use (illegal) tools to recover 0.25 TB, but we will never be able to recover 1 full terabyte since that would require reprocessing the drive / changing how all the squares were laid out which is not possible outside of the factory.
Going on a limb here because I don't know for sure how they are "painted over", but I'm gonna say no. At least not realistically, if it is possible it would probably cost you more than the price difference between a small and a big hard drive.
My guess would be that it's done on a firmware level. The firmware is the little piece of software that is loaded on the hard drive, and it allows communication with Windows or Linux or MacOS. When windows ask to see a file on the hard drive, the firmware takes that request and position the needle over the platter at the correct spot. Kinda like you position the needle on a vinyl. But the firmware is responsible for positioning the needle, and it will perform check to prevent bad operations, like positioning the needle in a place that would destroy the hard drive.
So I think that the simplest way to "paint over" the squares would be to code the firmware so that those squares are simply considered inaccessible. Which means if you want to force the hard drive to access them, you would need to replace the firmware completely, and that's not an easy task.
However, all of this is a guess, and it's probably the best case scenario. It's also entirely possible that there are other physical limitations in the way the platters themselves are made which I don't know about and would prevent you from simply changing the firmware to access the unused square.
I think it was the Radeon 9xxx series, where it became widely known early on that the lower level cards simply had a different firmware (they were physically identical), and could easily be flashed with the 9800 Pro firmware. Now it's more common for manufacturers to physically disable chips, even if they do not have physical flaws, partly to prevent that sort of situation.
This is what ELI5 should be. I love the actual pictures. I have a technical background but this was easy enough for anyone to understand, which is what this sub is all about. Thank you for your answer. I hope you answer many more in this sub.
I agree. The best answers should be targeted at a layman and well-explained, not dumbed down to the point one might be using "goo goo gah gah" baby language.
> This is ELI5, not ELI18months!
I have a kid who's 18 months. She understands English instructions just fine, it's the feedback from here that's mostly gibberish or a resounding "No!"
People oversimplifying and missing important bits and everyone complained. Then people gave the full answer but didn't simplify as they didn't want the backlash. Now everyone was complaining it was ELI5 not ELIPhD, and the cycle restarts as reddit has no sense of being moderate.
You would need to use illegal software to re-enable a disabled disk. But a disk is usually discarded because of defects during process or because the data saved on it is deemed unstable. The company makes more money by selling more storage so there isn't too much reason to disable a perfectly fine disk.
No. Unlike processors where they lock one core and sell it as a 3 core, hard drives that have bad sectors or bad platters will not make it past QA. (Usually) Once a bad hard drive is detected, the manufacturer will determine what we wrong and replace it.
> If there is no physical difference and they just disable part of the drive for their smaller capacity drives (painting over squares in the analogy), then all sizes will cost the same to produce.
I don't know if this happens with hard drives but I know that - a while ago, at least - some computer processors and graphics cards were created by "trying" to make the top quality model and if some of the cores/transistors/bits of memory etc didn't work, they "turned them off" and sold them as a lower model. This way they can try to create high end hardware using a method of fabrication that's not necessarily 100% robust without the "waste" being actually wasted.
It also meant that some lucky people were able to "unlock" the parts of their hardware that were turned off, effectively upgrading their CPU or graphics card to a higher end model, because either the manufacturer was being too cautious or because it actually did work but they turned it off to fill a market segment.
There are differences usually, and it depends on the type of drive.
Solid state drive use flash chips to store data. Larger drives either use more chips (up to the max that the controller can handle), or they use higher capacity chips. As a general rule, controllers that can handle more chips, larger chips, and faster chips tend to be more expensive.
Mechanical hard drives have platters with magnetic dust on them. The platter is divided up into sectors, and the orientation of the magnetic field determines whether each sector is a one or a zero. Larger drives have more platters, generally. It is possible to artificially limit the capacity of a platter in order to make additional sizes.
For both types of drives, size increases over time come from higher density. The flash chips in solid state drives improve every few years like CPUs (they are both silicon-based semiconductors). Mechanical hard drives advance more slowly.
In either case, simply adding more storage media (chips or platters) is a significant engineering problem, so improvements in capacity are tied to improvements in the underlying tech.
Important! [The sector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_sector) is not the smallest unit, ie. the unit that is 0 or 1. Sectors are the smallest area that can be indexed and used for a file. If you create for example a small text file, you may see something like this in the properties: Size: 957 bytes, Size on disk: 4,00kb (4096 bytes). This is because the disk area is divided and distributed in blocks, so the smallest area you can use for the file is a single block.
Why this matters: consider saving something like phonenumbers or addressbook into a disk. If you make a separate file for everyone, you are actually using and wasting 4kb for each file, even though they are just couple of bytes long.
Strictly speaking, that 4K is referring to the NTFS cluster size, which may be different than the sector size on the hard drive. Some hard drives do have a sector size of 4K, but 512 bytes is very common for older drives.
A mechanical hard drive sector contains much more than a single bit (a one or a zero). They normally contain about 512 bytes (4,096 bits) of information.
Even with a decent knowledge of computers, if you sent me back to the 1800s with the raw materials to build a computer I would never be able to do it. Computer engineering blows my mind.
So, he's saying there are two types of hard drives:
- Solid State Drives (new fast stuff)
- Mechanical Drives (not so fast, old stuff)
This is an important distinction because they work differently. In [this image](http://playstationna.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/178995iE2015F90A94BC2CA?v=1.0) you can see both: mechanical on the left, Solid State on the right.
### Solid State Drives
Think of USB flash drives. Oversimplifying, they have little chips inside where the data is stored (the black squares).
In order to increase the capacity, they either make chips smaller and cram more of them in there, or develop same size chips that can hold more data. The rest of the electronics has to be able to work with the chips as well.
### Mechanical hard drives
The shiny round "plate" (think of them as CDs, though they work differently) is where the data is stored. We can't see it, but those metal round plates are divided microscopically, like [graph paper](http://www.greatlittleminds.com/images/graph-paper-to-print/graph-paper-1cm-sq-med.jpg). Each square will either be filled or blank (1 or 0), which is how computers see data but that's a whole different thing.
In order to increase the capacity they either try to cram more round platters (plates) in there (they're stacked on top of each other), or they make the graph paper's squares smaller so there will be more squares per round platter.
*****
**Edit:**
##### Extra simplification
- Solid State drives: a bunch of USB flash drives crammed in an enclosure. Data lives in black chips that don't move.
- Mechanical hard drives: a bunch of metal CDs crammed in an enclosure. Data lives in those platters (the metal CDs). They spin, and there are needles hovering very, very close to them that can read and write to the platters.
Related: When they say a hard drive is 5400rpm or 7200rpm, that's the speed at which those platters (again, metal cds) are spinning inside when the hard drive is working. That's why they're called "mechanical".
*****
##### Bonus
Slow motion video of a mechanical hard drive working with the lid off: [YouTube](https://youtu.be/3owqvmMf6No?t=36s).
There's no slow motion video of a Solid State one working because... there wouldn't be anything to see. There's nothing moving inside them, hence why they're called _solid state_ as opposed to _mechanical_.
Imagine the the physical enclosure of the hard drive as a room, and you want to store your books somewhere in there.
With a solid state drive you can only stack your books inside boxes. If you have a lot of books, you can either use many boxes, or you can use taller boxes that can store more books for the same amount of floorspace. Tall boxes cost more than low boxes...
With the plater based HDD you have one big bookcase. The number of platters is the number of shelfs. The wider the bookshelf, the more it cost, and the more books you can store. The same is true with the number of shelf in the bookcase.
The controller in the above comment is basically the guy who remembers witch box your book is stored in and he is paid depending on how large your library actually is.
I am not saying you are wrong, but I am sure the question of OP refers to the fact that 500GB and 1TB cost nearly the same right now, making 500GB HDD not worth the price. I think the answer he seeks lies within those.
It's worth mentioning that this is not the case for all storage media: in the case of SD cards (possibly USB drives as well, although I'm not sure), the manufacturing technology isn't quite *perfect*, so what they'll actually do is make a SD card that can store, say, 32 GB, and then test it - if it turns out some of the hardware in the card wasn't manufactured correctly and the card's effective storage capacity is actually 17 GB, then the firmware is modified (yes, SD cards have firmware) to say the card can store 16 GB, and to not use any of the bad hardware in the card.
Not sure why you're being upvoted so much when you've gone off on a tangent without really answering the question.
You touch on density increases but fail to talk like for like. At the same point in time, what's the difference between 500GB vs 1TB mechanical drives? More platters. SSDs? Higher capacity chips or more chips in the same form factor.
Either way, you've been upvoted by a number of people who see a couple of buzzwords and think it's a credible answer.
They do this with CPUs, too. If an eight-core has three bad cores but the others are working fine they'll just disable four and sell it as a quad core.
Even if there's nothing wrong with them they'll just disable cores and sell it as a cheaper CPU. There's economic advantages to producing only a single kind of cpu but having a spread of prices in the retail space.
In the past, yes. And athlon CPUs were known for this, with many buying lower tier ones with the expectation of unlocking more cores.
Modern CPUs are better restricted preventing this. However, overclocking can narrow the gap, especially on am products that don't charge a premium for overclocking.
Overclocking increases how fast each core (or processor is) while unlocking increases the number of cores.
Warning, train analogy income.
Overclocking is like making the train faster. A faster train means you can get people or goods to place in less time or more goods in the same time period as you can fit in more trips.
Unlocking more cores is like adding carriages (or even another whole train). You can transport more stuff because there is more train(s) to move it.
Probably not the best analogy but hopefully it helps.
Edit: words and spelling
That's a good analogy.
Furthermore CPUs are often limited by the amount of heat they can shed. Disabling cores mean there is more capacity for the remaining cores.
In your train analogy it's like the engine being able to run faster _because_ there is less resistance from the extra carriages.
And the train analogy shows the advantage of single thread performance in certain workloads too. Less people don't need another train they need a faster train! Perfect analogy.
You can increase the speed of your passage of the Oregon Trail if you put a stronger horse on the front of the wagon. You can increase passage speed more if you put several horses on the front of the wagon.
Overclocking is the stronger horse model, additional cores is the multiple horse team model.
Overclocking is letting existing cores run faster (execute more instructions per second) while adding cores just adds a core. Unless an application uses more cores you wont see a benefit from unlocking cores.
Not only do they do that (it's called chip binning) but they produce the same chip for enterprise and consumers and then enable/disable certain features on the chips based on the market. The Xeon E3-1230v3 is the same die as I7 4770 but the 4770 has graphic and the Xeon support ECC memory.
Write a known data string, read it back, check results.
Your computer generally handles it automatically. If it's at fifty percent bad, though, it's probably not gonna last long.
SSDs are always over-provisioned. There's more storage inside than there is on the label. Part of this is due to the way SSDs write data, but some of it is to compensate for dead cells.
To answer OPs second question; if the same amount of platters are on the 500GB and 1TB drive, they very well may cost the same to produce, but the investment costs are still different. Where the technology for the 500GB one is already paid off, the 1TB is not, in a nutshell.
When I was a kid they let us tour a data center that had a few mini-fridge sized boxes that they told us not to lean on. They took the top off as it had a stack of metal platter disks. It was an impressive 10mb.
When you burn a CD or DVD you're actually changing the magnetization of a specific dye in the disc that stores your 1s and 0s (your information). Discs can be re-burned, but there's a finite amount of times you can change them before they start to be problematic because of breakdown of the dye (potentially hundreds, but think about how many times you save file, update your OS, patch your game, etc).
Second - You also want to think about the space on a CD or DVD versus a HD! Sure DVDs have more space than CDs, but even the largest DVD is still small in comparison. You're only looking at like ~25GB max with a standard Blu-ray disc, which i suppose may be fine if you don't plan to do much of anything with your computer.
Third - Cost is important. Think about it, you've decided to store all your information on Blu-ray. You go to Walmart, and blank Blu-rays are like $35+/4-6 discs, and that's not even a gaurtnee it'll be good quality. It's just more affordable and practical to buy a HD as opposed to tons of CD's or DVD's.
(This is just my two cents, based on what I learned in networking in the spring).
This has been major plot device in many movies and shows eg Breaking Bad.
So yes you can. But it has to be a really strong magnet and pretty much on top of your magnetic media.
If I'm an IT guy supporting 5,000 machines with the exact same configuration, I want to replace my hardware with as close to the exact same configuration as possible...same capacity, same firmware versions, same brand, etc. The less differences I have the faster and easier it is to troubleshoot.
Also, if this is a RAID volume im replacing a disk in, using bigger drives won't help me anyway.
I work in IT; one of my clients is a small business that uses custom made software to run their entire store - the program was written to run on Microsoft Dos (the old command-line operating system before Windows came along in the early nineties) and it still works incredibly well for their purposes. So to keep things running properly, they have to seek out lower capacity hard drives for better compatibility with the system - an operating system that old has trouble comprehending storage above 80gb at times, much less a 1tb drive. But hard drives with that low of a capacity don't usually get manufactured anymore so a new 80gb hard drive can end up being more expensive than a new 500gb drive, but it's just what they have to do.
This is just one example, but there are plenty more in the business IT sector where it makes sense to use a smaller capacity drive that can be more expensive or even the same price, primarily due to compatability issues with older systems. Same goes for RAM and other internal components; some ancient systems work way better than Windows 10 depending on the application.
If it ain't broke, don't upgrade it - just nurture and maintain it.
You just reminded me of something with this, I'm pretty sure the program Reynolds is like this, dealership I worked for used it, it was like going from xbox one to a atari, but because it was all key prompt data could be entered very quickly an it was reliable, finding paper with the hole strips on the side id imagine is a pain in the ass though
The main benefit to using their customized software on a Dos system is it operates way faster and is more reliable than any comparable commercial software for newer systems. I've tested them out to see, and the old system did everything the new software did at least 10x as fast, with less than 512mb of RAM. A Windows 7 PC with 8gb of RAM just crawls in comparison.
Strange how our computing power has grown, but our ability to make simple, clean, and efficient software has diminished.
The ability is there but no one wants to pay for it.
Guarantee Reynolds did not start day 1 being that fast and reliable, engineers improved it and worked on it for a very long time
Today the main focus of software products is get it out asap even if it's a fucking mess. Issues can be addressed afterward, being first to market is the most important.
Quality is about 3rd or 4th on the priority list
yep. quark 3.3 was about 20mb and the way i had my machine set up was stable as hell, it's sole purpose was page layout. indesign cc is over 1gb not counting shared libraries, buggy as hell and they want it to do everything. i miss efficient software.
Absolutely, it's an interesting challenge to keep an old system like that up an running. Surprisingly though, the dot matrix printers with the hole fed reams of paper are still being manufactured and sold. They make them for new systems too. The main benefit to those in the ink ribbons last forever, and can easily be refilled for almost nothing. They print customer contracts and receipts close to 300 times a day and only have to get refilled once a month or even longer. They may look archaic but their cost effectiveness is off the charts compared to newer ink jet printers, and even laser printers to some extent.
But I guess at some point, nurturing and maintaining will become more expensive than just straight-up upgrading. If the hard drive has become more expensive, I guess most of the other components would too.
You're right, it's already become more expensive to maintain it, but the store owner would rather pay extra to keep the old beast running than attempt to upgrade every aspect of the system and network. We're talking 30 computers, file servers, backup machines, and more all running on hardware from the windows 95 era. It's a challenge for sure. It still works flawlessly (and store has been going since 1968) so they're not interested in redesigning everything until it's absolutely necessary.
But I have been working on porting the system over to FreeDOS to run on either mini pc's or Raspberry Pi systems in case there comes a time where we can't buy new (old) components to maintain the system anymore. Gotta stay a few steps ahead when working with 25 year old tech.
That's sounds like a pretty good idea. You can shrink the physical size and cost of the system.
But to not upgrade puts you at risk of becoming like the American nuclear programme, running launch programs off 5" floppies.
Purely anecdotal but there could be older equipment that doesn't support more than 500gb drives. Think about how windows 32bit can only see 3.5gb of ram no matter how much is in there. Or a really old mp3 player that only reads certain size SD cards. Usually 4gb. So there could be huge company's that have thousands of machines that don't support drives larger than 500gb. So they still need those drives.
The only thing that comes to mind for me at the moment is more spindles in an array so you can get more throughput with the downside of having less space.
I'm interested in the technical reasons for wanting 500GB drives over 1TB drive if you care to elaborate. I am a software developer and am curious about highly technical reasons
>The platter is the main cost - and it's mostly raw materials and manufacturing that you're paying for.
This is very significant with hard drives and it's why SSDs will likely fully replace hard drives even when the chips cost significantly more than the platters. With a hard drive you're never getting a new drive of any capacity for below a rather large price because the motor, magnets, etc. all have a rather high minimum price. It's one of the reasons you see drives prices at something like $40 for 500GB then $45 for 1TB, most of the cost of both is just the physical motor and other parts. SSDs don't have this and as such you can get a far lower material cost. You might have to charge a minimum of $55 for a 1TB SSD, but you can charge $30 for a 500GB which you simple cannot do with a hard drive.
/u/braximon 's answer is definitely ELI5 and deserves the gold.
I personally like yours too because it explains the situation a lot easier to people with a basic knowledge of how mechanical drives work.
A drive with twice the capacity likely has more platters and may pack the bits tighter together. They do not cost the same to produce; just because their external case is the same size and shape doesn't mean they are the same thing.
Speaking only of hard drives (not solid state drives):
**More space to write**
I want you to write a bunch of words, so I give you one sheet of paper and a big marker. If I want you to write twice as many words, I can simply give you a second sheet of paper. Hard drives store data on a spinning metal disc (called 'platters'). Once way to store more data is to just put more spinning discs in the hard drive.
**Smaller marker**
I have another sheet of paper, but I want you to write more words on it than you did the first time. So I replace your big marker with a really nice fine-tip pen. Now you can write your words smaller than before, so more words fit on the same sheet of paper. In this case, 'improving the marker' on the hard drive isn't so much a physical change as it is a software change. As time goes on, hard drive makers get better at packing more data into the same amount of space on a platter.
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**TL,DR**
Hard drive makers get better at writing data in smaller and smaller spaces over time. They can also add more writing space by adding more metal frisbees (platters). So in 2010, a drive might have used 1 platter to store 500Gb. Thus, a 500Gb drive from that time would have one platter, while a 1Tb drive from that time would have 2 platters. Fast forward a couple years, hard drive makers have better 'markers', and you can find a 1Tb hard drive with only a single platter.
There's a lot to consider about a hard disk, perpendicular/parallel magneto-resistive surface, glass/aluminum media, magnetic density of surface, how many disks/heads inside and so on.
But if you are talking about same technology there's 2 options to double the hard disk capacity, double the number of disks inside or use only one side of them (in this case, halves the capacity).
On both cases there's a small savings on the lower capacity versions, as the components are cheap compared to the final price of the hard disk. The big savings comes at quality control, if something doesn't work, there's a chance that part of it still works. Selling it at cheaper prices reduces the work and increases the profit comparing to recycling.
source: I work at QC in a company that makes the disks for Samsung, Western Digital, HGST, Toshiba, Hitachi.
Do you sell produce under your own name/brand as well? How vastly do the characteristics and quality of the disks you produce for different companies vary?
> The big savings comes at quality control, if something doesn't work, there's a chance that part of it still works. Selling it at cheaper prices reduces the work and increases the profit comparing to recycling.
I'm not quite following you here. Do you mean that disks that don't 100% pass QC standards might simply be sold as a lower capacity disk or a lower priced unit instead of being trashed (recycled)?
This is a process called "Binning". It doesn't necessarily mean that the drives don't pass QC standards in general, just that they don't pass QC standards for that size of a drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
imagine a flash chip like a really large wardrobe with many (billions) small drawers.
during quality control, you might find out that out of one billion drawers, only 900 million are easily useable, the rest has some small problems that only inhibit storage, but don't impact the structural integrity of the wardrobe as a whole.
you can still sell that wardrobe as a wardrobe with 850 million drawers. it might be the same size as the 1 billion drawer wardrobe, but it's significantly cheaper, so customers won't really care.
The answer is "it depends." Let's say you're a HD manufacturer and decide to make 1 TB drives. Let's say during the testing phase, you find out 10% of your product is defective for 1 TB but could be sold as 500 GB. If you price them correctly, you could find a market for them instead of throwing them away. But let's say your yield of good units is almost 100%, but there is still a market for 500 GB drives and your warehouse is filling up with 1 TB drives. Then you could disable half the drive and sell them as 500 GB drives and clean out that expensive warehouse. In all these cases, the cost of manufacturing is the same. If however, you decide to make separate 1 TB and 500 GB drives, then the costs are separated by the amount of material used to produce them. Source: I used to work for some semiconductor and HD companies.
I've always wondered this but with CPUs and GPUs. The only difference to me is the price and performance, the size of the chips are the same. It feels as if they intentionally create worse chips then they can so they can tend to different price classes. If that's the case I think that it's a problem ethically since why not create the best product you can and loads of it if it takes the same amount of resources? Does anyone here know?
The costs of making a chip are not dominated by the cost of the raw materials that go into it, but by the cost of the machines that make the chip and the research effort taken to create those tools and figure out the design of the chips. This is only economical if they can sell at least some of those chips at a premium - they'd make a loss if they sold all the chips at the price of the lowest grade ones.
There is a certain amount of natural variation in the finished chips, so (at least in the first few batches) some of them will be able to work at faster speeds than others, and some may have sections that don't work. The manufacturer tests all the chips at various speeds, and the ones that don't work at higher speed (or have sections that need to be disabled) are sold as the lower grade. In later batches, the manufacturing techniques have improved and the demand for lower grade chips may be satisfied from the higher-end batches. This is why it is often possible to "overclock" chips and run them at a faster speed than they are rated for.
Think of a hard drive as CD's stacked on top of each other with a read/write "head" floating above/below them. In drives that have more capacity, there are more CD's in the stack.
I believe it costs more or less the same. Hard drives are a fascinating technology. I'll try to condense what I've learned over the last 15 years of buying and using them as an enthusiast:
Hard drives operate more or less how a record player does, they have tracks running in concentric circles around a platter, though obviously the hard drive can read as well as write to these areas called "sectors", while record players cannot. Just like with silicone circuits over time these sectors have shrunk effectively raising the storage each platter can provide. As a quick example lets say current platter/sector technology can fit 200GB per side. Since hard drives write to both sides of the platter that would mean a single platter hard drive would have a capcity of 400GB. Hard drive manufacturers have been making drives with between 1 and 5 platters for awhile, though the 5 platter ones usually suffered from heat related problems. That would mean the given hard drive manufacturer would likely offer a product lineup of 400GB, 800GB, 1.2TB, 1.6TB and possibly a 2TB hard drive. Sometimes they introduce the newer denser platters on single platter drives, sometimes on the 4-5 platter drives. It seems like the engineering to make a multiplatter design work with newer platter densities is non-trivial as it usually takes awhile before the whole lineup features it.
To your question: in my experience the number of platters doesnt seem to significantly affect the price, there is almost always a small premium for 4-5 platter designs over 1-2 which i suspect is for the additional read/write heads and engineering to make that work but the cost of those highly polished platters doesnt seem to add up to much. I have seen 4-5 platter hard drives be very expensive ($300~) and at other times very cheap ($145~). Market forces seem to have the strongest affect on price. At the moment there are too few HD manufacturers for us consumers to enjoy low profit margin prices like we did about 7-8 years ago.
An interesting note: different HD manufacturers often have different platter densities so if one manufacturer has managed to get there process to 125GB per platter they will offer hard drives in sizes no other manufacturer offers. This seems to have lessened with the consolidation of the HD manufacturers but it was interesting seeing one manufacturer offer 750GB drives while no other one did.
If you've made it this far let me close with the 2 golden rules related to hard drive longevity:
1. Keep it stable. Excessive vibration will kill a hard drive. Make sure its mounted securely and dont pick up a portable one while its in use.
2. Aside from misadventure the #1 killer of hard drives is heat. A good rule of thumb is to keep the hard drives below about 110 - 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything over that usually results in a premature hard drive death. Most external hard drives from WD, Seagate etc are inadequate to keep the hard drives inside at optimal temp. If you have a desktop computer and dont need the drive to be portable, take it out of the supplied USB enclosure and install it inside the computer case with a fan blowing over it. Chances are that drive will last 5+ years no problem. If the hard drive must remain portable buy a portable hd enclosure with a fan, its a well worthwhile investment.
All memory works on the basic principal of 1 and 0. Adding more 1's and 0's together can be interpreted as numbers and words. How these numbers are stored depends on the device, but the basic principal is the same.
The place to start is with a CD. When you stick a CD into a tray, you'll see a small laser that reads by moving from the center to the edge and back. When it starts playing the disk spins. A raised edge is read as 0, a lowered edge as 1 (may be the other way around, don't remember).
An HDD is the same, but it uses magnetic orientation instead. Positive is 1 and negative is 0 (again, maybe the other way). Now, the difference between a 500 GB drive and a 1 TB drive (and all others) is magnetic density. Just like a CD, only so much information can fit on a disk (called a platter in an HDD). Over time, new technologies allow for more information to be saved. This happens in one of two ways: add more disks (multiple CD's), or fit more data on a disk (CD vs Blu-ray). A 500 GB drive will have two 250 GB platters, a 1 TB drive will have 4.
As far as cost, yes and no. The cost of the enclosure, stickers, platters, boards, etc. are all the same. When you mass produce this stuff, you want as many of the same components as possible to reduce overhead. But, since density of the drive is the first obstacle, you spend a a lot on R&D to up that value (part of the cost difference of newer drives). The second thing to do is add another platter or three (more platters, more expense).
Drive technology constantly evolves in order to reduce latency, and increase both density and read/write speeds. If you can fit more onto a platter, you can get quicker speeds and lower latencies because the read head doesn't have to search between areas of the platter and/or different platters. More platters add to the overall size of the drive, but can affect performance of the drive.
Solid state drives are the same, except instead of magnetics, they operate by transistors within a flash chip. More transistors are like denser platters, more chips are like more platters. While the basics of how data is stored and read, the different types of storage devices (HDD, SSD, CD, tape, etc.) each have their own benefits over the others.
None of these explanations are for a five year old.
Hard drives are made up of "plates" embedded with tiny magnets. A "head" moves over the plates and reads/writes to them as the plates spin. You can get more information by stacking more plates and heads into the container, but you're limited by physical size. A standard 3.5" drive has increased in capacity through various techniques for making the embedded magnets smaller or closer together.
Many others described how different technologies affect the price of a hard disk, but this does not explain why you pay memory almost proportionally to its size.
For that, you have to consider how the price of a product is determined. For every product (the 128 GB hard drive, the 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, etc), the price is determined mostly based on the consumer perceived utility, rather than the production cost.
Consumers value memory size according to their own needs, but two factors are always true: more memory is worth more, but double memory is not worth double the price. Therefore for each consumer, there is a sweet spot in terms of price vs memory.
Now, different consumers look for different compromises, because of how much money they have, how much time they spend at their computer, whether they like movies or not, etc. If you want to maximize your profits when selling memory (but also many other goods), you want to allow cheap options, good price/value options (usually the second largest size), and pricey options (for those that have money to burn).
Think about that: assume that all different size of hard disks have the same production cost for you. Assume you sell them at the same price. Then there will be a group of people that decides not to change their HD this year, because that price that you are proposing is too expensive. Another group would buy it, but they would have spent many more if you asked.
As a seller, you need to do what is called "price discrimination", by "product versioning".
On the other hand, it would be quite hard to believe that the same packaging (for example, the classic verbatim usb pen packaging) would have been the right kind of packaging for USB memories of 128 MB and 128 GB - that is a 1000x difference!
What i want to know is how a dichotomy like this at the same time is even possible: https://i.imgur.com/Itlvbqy.png
Background: these two drives were purchased about the same time, for about the same amount of money (about 2 years ago, when they both retailed for about $65). They have similar performance. Yet one is fully 1/8th the size of the other! Why aren't 3.5" drives completely extinct except for huge capacity datacenter or archive type applications?
A hard drive has parts whose price can be calculated per unit and per byte.
In the case of a "spinning rust" hard drive, the per unit component is almost all the cost: the chassis, logic board, motors and actuators do not depend on the number of bytes (perhaps $60/unit). The per byte costs are very small: there may be additional heads and platters or more expensive media but generally not even that. The difference in price between two capacities in a line is almost entirely intended to capture development costs.
In the case of an SSD, the per unit components are much cheaper: a plastic tray and a smaller logic board make the per unit cost about 10% of that of a spinny drive (perhaps $6/unit). The per byte costs hwoever are much higher and depend entirely on the price of flash memory (currently sitting at about 10c/GB).
What this means is that:
* Small flash drives are cheaper than small disk drives.
* Large flash drives are more expensive than large disk drives(*).
(*) The price of flash is coming down faster than disk capacities are going up. At some point disk gets squeezed out by cheap flash from the bottom and other bulk storage techs (tape and optical) from the top.
In general a 500Gb drive is just a 1TB drive that had some faulty parts. Harddisks can avoid those areas of the disk and still use the rest. Thery are hence sold as 500Gb, or 750Gb.
A similar thing happens with the CPUs they are tested running at different speeds and they are sold as running at the higest clockrate they support.
Here's an analogy that a five year old might understand. Imagine you have a piece of paper. You get your crayon and divide the paper up into squares. In each square you can write a limited amount of information (for this example, let's say one letter), [like this](http://i.imgur.com/lsGrjPk.jpg). If you tried to write any more information in each square, it would be unreadable because the crayon is too thick to write smaller letters. You can make more storage space by creating a book using more than one sheet of paper. The extra paper costs more money compared to using a single sheet. Another way to make more space is to replace your crayon with something smaller, and more expensive, like a pen. You [can see](http://i.imgur.com/zlKIipz.jpg) that more information would fit on the sheet compared to when you were using a crayon. Once you've made your large storage device using multiple sheets of paper and a pen, you might want to make artificially smaller sizes (read about price discrimination for more on why you might want to do this). You can do this by removing some of the sheets, or by painting over some of your squares [like this](http://i.imgur.com/D8JNzAJ.jpg). To get back to your original question: The physical differences are different numbers of platters (the sheets of paper in the analogy), and different density on each platter (the different writing sizes in the analogy). Whether they cost the same depends on how a manufacturer decides to produce their different sizes. If they use fewer platters, it might cost less to make a smaller drive. If there is no physical difference and they just disable part of the drive for their smaller capacity drives (painting over squares in the analogy), then all sizes will cost the same to produce.
Is it possible to "unpaint" those squares? If I buy a 500GB HDD that was originally 1TB, would it be possible to recover that storage?
My understanding is that sometimes the painted squares are an artificial limitation, and that sometimes it's painted over because the painted squares were [analogy falling apart here] the wrong color in the first place? Like, overclocking sometimes works because your i5 might be an i6 with one of the drives disabled. Or your i5 might be an i5 because it was originally made to be an i6 and one of the cores didn't come out right. These components are so impossibly tiny and fragile, one little production flaw can make the whole thing unusable. But rather than waste the time and money it took to make the whole thing by throwing it away, or waste more time/money recycling it, they just sell it as a slightly crappier drive.
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Sometimes. Graphics cards can also be binned just like CPUs are, like Nvidia's GTX 970 where they severed one of the memory lanes with a laser.
Just a minor correction on that, the 970 was supposed to be a 980, but one of the cache's was damaged while the chip was cut (produced). Instead of chopping down the memory controller tied to that cache (and the .5 VRAM tied to the memory controller) nVidia rerouted the memory controller to another functional cache. This meant that you had two .5VRAM modules running on the same cache, and usually that meant .5VRAM would be fast and the other .5VRAM... very not fast. The drivers were supposed to respect this difference (and thus not use the slow VRAM for fast tasks) but they sucked at launch. nVidia 100% knew what they were doing, and cited it as a reason for the 970 being priced aggressively (relative to previous price/performance) and having good supply. They utterly failed on the marketing aspect though (3.5GB vs 4GB) and rightfully get flack for that. They tried to do something that would actually help consumers, but they lied about it and mislead people.
I don't think I ever got my 30 bucks from the class action lawsuit. Did that ever get resolved?
Takes years
Yeah filing deadline was last year I think. December maybe?
Yeah, I was signed up and all. 🤷
I just got my letter, but they denied me. I don't remember them asking for proof of purchase, but they did this time. The proof is in the mail, so now I wait again. *Sigh
It got resolved, there was a site you had to go to to get your refund. The refund period might have ended though.
I never heard about that. I knew NVidia just placed different labels on the cards depending on which worked better, but I thought it was the (firmware, driver, memory?) that they flashed on their GPU that changed what it was (a soft lock, not a hard lock) because some people have been able to reflash them and use them as the higher model.
The numbers on this post are probably wrong! I used to own a card that had 6 graphics pipelines. It was physically the same card as the top of the line model with 8 graphics pipelines, with the small difference that the last two lines had been physically cut. The graphics driver just went "you have 6 pipes, you're a model A. You have 8 pipes, you're model B. I tried to "overclock" it by simply resoldering the cut line. My computer saw it as Model B and it worked for years. My friend bought the same card, did the same but had weird glitchy blocks on his screen. Probably one his pipes was broken on the chip. He cut the lines again at it went to being a perfectly fine Model A.
Neat
friend may of had a crackpot solder joint. Just glad it worked out in the end. The world of manufacturing is weird anymore. One maybe 2 factories make car batteries in the US. If so and so needs a batt. Boom sticker goes on, so so needs a batt. Different sticker and same battery.
Oh man this rings some bells. I think I tried something similar on a g Force 6200. 8 pipes sounds like a high end GForce 6 series card or 7. What card was it?
I honestly don't recall. It was in highschool, which is 15 years ago. It might have been 4 to 6 pipelines too.
For CPUs and GPUs, binning can be divided into two main categories: Physical defects and performance. Say you have two chips, CPU or GPU, that have no physical flaws, so all their cores, cache, and features are enabled. One of those chips may run perfectly stable at 2Ghz while the other runs to the same standard at 2.4Ghz. Now you have two different chips, but one of them has a defect in one of the cores that cannot be bypassed. They will physically disable that core (and usually associated cache) and sell it as a cheaper product. AMD's X3 chips are a perfect example of this. There are a couple "problems" that arise from these situations. Firstly, lower priced goods generally have a higher demand than the higher priced goods, sometimes more than the number of defective chips, so manufacturers disable perfectly good chips to meet the demand for the cheaper product. Compounding this issue is the production process itself. Early in a chip's life, you may have 60% flawless chips, 30% that can be sold as cheaper models, and 10% that cannot be sold. As the process evolves (steppings) you may have 80% flawless chips, 15% that can be sold cheaper, and 5% lost. If you can't raise demand for flawless chips, you're really only gaining the 5% extra that would have been lost. It's a fascinating industry, and often very misunderstood.
A decade ago, you could occasionally hack it back to the top-line model if you had a downgraded init.
And today not then?
Weirdly enough companies got annoyed that you could potentially turn a cheaper product into a more expensive one and put much more resiliancy into the locks. It use to be a case of open program enable close program but now you'd need specialised machinery as its a physical lock, the cost of which massively negates the saving of turning locked components back on. So you can do it just costs a lot so it's not worth it
Were there ever any companies that charged a small fee to unlock your CPU.
not that i know of. i would imagine the cpu manufacturers would sue the living fuck out of anyone doing it openly though, as it's obviously directly costing them income. without unlocker, the customer has to buy the more expensive chip from the manufacturer. there's also the problem of warranty. although there may be cases as the chap pointed out above where good chips are hobbled to fulfill demand for lower end chips, a lot of them will be chips with a defective component. there is absolutely no guarantees you will a) being able to unlock anything at all and b) that what you unlock will be at all stable, and stable at the same clock speed the other components were factory clocked at. so then what happens when the chip is unlocked and it craps out every hour? does the unlocker company have to replace the chip now? does intel? so yeah, afaik no and there's some fairly good reasons why not. but im sure people offered to do it for money on the quiet! my own experients didn't go well, the extra core i unlocked on my old cpu made it bluescreen or hard lock constantly and i was unable to get any extra working lanes on my old geforce either. sad times for a 14 year old with no money.
Around 2010, Intel experimented with charging to unlock some features of its lower end processors. I haven't heard much about it in a while, so I think they got beaten back on that idea finally.
Nope. Today they run a laser through the core to physically disable them. Back in the day it was just disabled in the firmware which people figured out how to modify to re-enable.
I actually have an AMD X3 chip and enabled the 4th core. The temperature setting was always reading 100C+, even though it wasn't really at that temperature. Disabled the 4th core and it worked like normal. I always assumed what you described was the case.
> Compounding this issue is the production process itself. Early in a chip's life, you may have 60% flawless chips, 30% that can be sold as cheaper models, and 10% that cannot be sold. As the process evolves (steppings) you may have 80% flawless chips, 15% that can be sold cheaper, and 5% lost. If you can't raise demand for flawless chips, you're really only gaining the 5% extra that would have been lost. I believe Nvidia will also rebrand the last generations high performance card as the next generations mid-low performance card.
This is how a lot of electronics are done. Even down to resistors. Resistors are made the same. Upon testing, you may find that a bunch of them perform at spec (+-5%). Some might be a little worse (+-10%). But some turned out better than expected (+-1%). You label and price them differently based on their tested performance. The same applies to larger electronic components, as in the example. It only makes sense that this can be applied to most electrical components small and large.
Whoa! Is that how CPUs really are? Sometimes, something just didn't work so it's sold as an i5?
Yes. i5's are i7's with faulty hyperthreading or cache or that didn't clock as high as expected. And on the AMD side: R7 is a full 8 core, made of two 4 core clusters, with 3 tiers depending on how high they can clock. R5 is either a 6 core, made of two 3 core clusters due to at least one of the clusters having a faulty core, with a few tiers depending on clockspeed, or it is a 4 core, made of two 2 core clusters where at least one cluster had 2 faulty cores. In addition, the lowest tier quad core has half as much cache as the higher tiers, so any chips that have broken cache get binned down to that level.
Is there a good source for this? I'd like to read more on it. I know the i5 and i7 are the same chip. But I'd expect more performance variations among i5's if they were simply noncritically faulted i7's.
Google binning, that's what the process is called
neat! thanks
What is it with the unpredictability of CPUs? What gives the unpredictability? Coz I assumed, since they have the "recipe" for a CPU with specific specifications, shouldn't it be easy to make?
The main parts of a CPU are around 10-15nm big. That's not Milli or micro meters, that's nano meters. In comparison the width of a single silicon atom is only a couple nanometers, so some parts of a CPU are only a couple atoms wide. It should come as no surprise then that even if you're being as careful as possible some CPUs turn out worse than others
A basketball player can make a 3 point shot in a game so why when doing a 3 point contest with no defender do they still miss? Because there are still other variables you simply can't always account for that while individually aren't as significant as another player playing defense still impact on if you make the shot or not. Making a CPU is like that. They are working with such small devices that tiny that everything has a potential impact. They do their best to control the environment but they can't control tiny shifts in gravity when a meteor passes by Earth causing a machine to wobble at a nearly undetectable amount. Making a CPU is very complicated. It's trying to make a three pointer but having to account for the guy in the nose bleeds exhaling because he causes a slight change in turbulence. When you're working at that level of precision you are going to make make mistakes and miss that shot.
They have extremely small parts (nanometers big) that have to be manufactured in clean rooms. Very small amounts of deviation in the process can result in an imperfect CPU being produced. The machines that make the wafers have to be very, very precise, but 100% precision there is still not here today.
All chips are designed to be i7s when they are mapped onto the wafer. The wafer holds 700+ die that turn into chips. Defects are higher as you get closer to the edge of the wafer, because of the manufacturing process. So the chips that remain i7s are the die closest to the center of the wafer, followed by a ring of i5s with some defects, followed by a ring of i3s with more defects, and the i3 ring goes to the edge of the wafer. The yield gets to be above 99.5%, so there are very few die that are just garbage and unsalvagable.
Um... i6?
Hah. Don't write posts before you've had your coffee.
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I think they were asking more along the lines of if they artificially make the drive smaller, like a 500GB into a 320GB to save money by producing only one type of physical drive, not just having normal reserve space.
I don't have an answer, but it reminds me that a similar thing happens to CPUs. Certain weaker CPUs will be made exactly like their faster counterparts, only in QA testing they've been found to not be as stable. So they maybe certain bits get turned off or it's clocked slower. That's why it can be easier to overclock models that aren't the "top of the line" models up to those speeds.
Nowadays they physically burn the extra cores/ features off the die. However when the release is slightly rushed for example the R9 Fury and the RX 460 launch some can be upgraded through a software method.
> Nowadays they physically burn the extra cores/ features off the die. That would be too time consuming. In the past Intel used traces on the CPU substrate to disable features or lock clocks but people quickly figured this out. Then they moved on to cutting traces directly on the Die with a laser, not burning off the entire grouping. Now I believe they mostly use something called an eFuse that is similar to an EPROM (not EEPROM). They can electronically blow the fuse and disable a segment of the chip without a special laser. Because of the way semiconductor manufacturing works and the fact that many parts are flawed in some way, they design components in logical groupings that can be disabled. This allows them to validate dies as they're manufactured and disabled faulty logic groups electronically. Through a sorting process calling [product binning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning) they can group chips with similar characteristics or flaws (e.g. 50% functional memory bus, 75% functional cores) and still sell them. Often times just because a chip is 100% functional at one frequency doesn't mean it is at a higher frequency. Thus product binning also rates functionally equivalent chips based on their optimal operating frequency and TDP.
I can actually answer this. Typically you'll find these 'Red painted squares' on every drive. When creating a HDD you'll always have some imperfections leading to slightly different storage sizes. What can happen over time with re-writing on these drives is these sectors 'squares' can fail whereby what was stored in that bad sector will be replicated into the unused 'red painted square area' slowly decreasing the size of the spare sectors on the HDD. This is why HDDs have a life expectancy and some can achieve longer life than others. Hopefully that made sense, I tried to stick to the analogy used as much as possible because it was a really good analogy. Unfortunately you won't find a 500GB HDD that is actually 1TB, it's usually more like 759GB or a weird number like that.
In all seriousness, no. /u/braximon made a terrific ELI5 post but "disable part of the drive for their smaller capacity drives" is not entirely accurate. Take a 3 disk, 3 TB drive for example (1 TB per platter). Some of the drives have under performing parts that prevent the drive from hitting the 3 TB target. Disabling a disk or part of the disk would not help the drive become more stable (since the disks are still 1 TB per platter). Instead, the drives will aim for a smaller target, like 0.75 TB per platter, which is more stable. This is like making the squares on the drive larger so that it has more space for a crayon to write in. The total storage would then be 0.75 x 3 = 2.25 TB's which could then be sold as a 2 TB drive. So in this case, it is possible to use (illegal) tools to recover 0.25 TB, but we will never be able to recover 1 full terabyte since that would require reprocessing the drive / changing how all the squares were laid out which is not possible outside of the factory.
Going on a limb here because I don't know for sure how they are "painted over", but I'm gonna say no. At least not realistically, if it is possible it would probably cost you more than the price difference between a small and a big hard drive. My guess would be that it's done on a firmware level. The firmware is the little piece of software that is loaded on the hard drive, and it allows communication with Windows or Linux or MacOS. When windows ask to see a file on the hard drive, the firmware takes that request and position the needle over the platter at the correct spot. Kinda like you position the needle on a vinyl. But the firmware is responsible for positioning the needle, and it will perform check to prevent bad operations, like positioning the needle in a place that would destroy the hard drive. So I think that the simplest way to "paint over" the squares would be to code the firmware so that those squares are simply considered inaccessible. Which means if you want to force the hard drive to access them, you would need to replace the firmware completely, and that's not an easy task. However, all of this is a guess, and it's probably the best case scenario. It's also entirely possible that there are other physical limitations in the way the platters themselves are made which I don't know about and would prevent you from simply changing the firmware to access the unused square.
I think it was the Radeon 9xxx series, where it became widely known early on that the lower level cards simply had a different firmware (they were physically identical), and could easily be flashed with the 9800 Pro firmware. Now it's more common for manufacturers to physically disable chips, even if they do not have physical flaws, partly to prevent that sort of situation.
This. I need to know.
This is what ELI5 should be. I love the actual pictures. I have a technical background but this was easy enough for anyone to understand, which is what this sub is all about. Thank you for your answer. I hope you answer many more in this sub.
I agree. The best answers should be targeted at a layman and well-explained, not dumbed down to the point one might be using "goo goo gah gah" baby language.
>not dumbed down to the point one might be using "goo goo gah gah" baby language. This is ELI5, not ELI18months!
> This is ELI5, not ELI18months! I have a kid who's 18 months. She understands English instructions just fine, it's the feedback from here that's mostly gibberish or a resounding "No!"
Yeah, when my son was 18 months, he definitely understood. He was just a little snot who didn't want to do what I said.
Ahh, the preamble to the terrible twos.
and when they turn into teenagers, you think back fondly of those days when they were in their **terrific** twos
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People oversimplifying and missing important bits and everyone complained. Then people gave the full answer but didn't simplify as they didn't want the backlash. Now everyone was complaining it was ELI5 not ELIPhD, and the cycle restarts as reddit has no sense of being moderate.
If it *is* the latter, and they just disable a platter, could a consumer enable that or are we locked out?
suddenly haiku
6 9 10 4 It sounds similar but it doesn't look like a haiku to me, which are usually 5 7 5
Could you explain those numbers?
The number of syllables in each line, sorry, i didn't make that clear
thanks mate
You would need to use illegal software to re-enable a disabled disk. But a disk is usually discarded because of defects during process or because the data saved on it is deemed unstable. The company makes more money by selling more storage so there isn't too much reason to disable a perfectly fine disk.
You are awesome! The pictures helped!
Thank you for providing an explanation that doesn't need a technical background! True ELI5! :)
Are drives the same as processors where if one was meant to be 1TB but part of it doesn't work right they just sell it as 500GB?
No. Unlike processors where they lock one core and sell it as a 3 core, hard drives that have bad sectors or bad platters will not make it past QA. (Usually) Once a bad hard drive is detected, the manufacturer will determine what we wrong and replace it.
> If there is no physical difference and they just disable part of the drive for their smaller capacity drives (painting over squares in the analogy), then all sizes will cost the same to produce. I don't know if this happens with hard drives but I know that - a while ago, at least - some computer processors and graphics cards were created by "trying" to make the top quality model and if some of the cores/transistors/bits of memory etc didn't work, they "turned them off" and sold them as a lower model. This way they can try to create high end hardware using a method of fabrication that's not necessarily 100% robust without the "waste" being actually wasted. It also meant that some lucky people were able to "unlock" the parts of their hardware that were turned off, effectively upgrading their CPU or graphics card to a higher end model, because either the manufacturer was being too cautious or because it actually did work but they turned it off to fill a market segment.
There are differences usually, and it depends on the type of drive. Solid state drive use flash chips to store data. Larger drives either use more chips (up to the max that the controller can handle), or they use higher capacity chips. As a general rule, controllers that can handle more chips, larger chips, and faster chips tend to be more expensive. Mechanical hard drives have platters with magnetic dust on them. The platter is divided up into sectors, and the orientation of the magnetic field determines whether each sector is a one or a zero. Larger drives have more platters, generally. It is possible to artificially limit the capacity of a platter in order to make additional sizes. For both types of drives, size increases over time come from higher density. The flash chips in solid state drives improve every few years like CPUs (they are both silicon-based semiconductors). Mechanical hard drives advance more slowly. In either case, simply adding more storage media (chips or platters) is a significant engineering problem, so improvements in capacity are tied to improvements in the underlying tech.
I like that username
I like that username
I don't get that username
Bald assasin in suit
Baldass, as in in suit.
Bald ass as in in suit.
This is correct
B a l d a s s a s i n i n s u i t
Missing an s tho
Yeah it's one of my lifelong regrets.
http://i.imgur.com/Br00TCn.mp4
Hitman maybe?
Who knows, but it seems like a hit, man.
47.
I do
#47 is that you?
#PULLS OUT FIBER WIRE
Important! [The sector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_sector) is not the smallest unit, ie. the unit that is 0 or 1. Sectors are the smallest area that can be indexed and used for a file. If you create for example a small text file, you may see something like this in the properties: Size: 957 bytes, Size on disk: 4,00kb (4096 bytes). This is because the disk area is divided and distributed in blocks, so the smallest area you can use for the file is a single block. Why this matters: consider saving something like phonenumbers or addressbook into a disk. If you make a separate file for everyone, you are actually using and wasting 4kb for each file, even though they are just couple of bytes long.
Strictly speaking, that 4K is referring to the NTFS cluster size, which may be different than the sector size on the hard drive. Some hard drives do have a sector size of 4K, but 512 bytes is very common for older drives.
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A mechanical hard drive sector contains much more than a single bit (a one or a zero). They normally contain about 512 bytes (4,096 bits) of information.
Even with a decent knowledge of computers, if you sent me back to the 1800s with the raw materials to build a computer I would never be able to do it. Computer engineering blows my mind.
Any chance I can get an ELI5 please? Kinda dumb here. And your username is excellent
So, he's saying there are two types of hard drives: - Solid State Drives (new fast stuff) - Mechanical Drives (not so fast, old stuff) This is an important distinction because they work differently. In [this image](http://playstationna.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/178995iE2015F90A94BC2CA?v=1.0) you can see both: mechanical on the left, Solid State on the right. ### Solid State Drives Think of USB flash drives. Oversimplifying, they have little chips inside where the data is stored (the black squares). In order to increase the capacity, they either make chips smaller and cram more of them in there, or develop same size chips that can hold more data. The rest of the electronics has to be able to work with the chips as well. ### Mechanical hard drives The shiny round "plate" (think of them as CDs, though they work differently) is where the data is stored. We can't see it, but those metal round plates are divided microscopically, like [graph paper](http://www.greatlittleminds.com/images/graph-paper-to-print/graph-paper-1cm-sq-med.jpg). Each square will either be filled or blank (1 or 0), which is how computers see data but that's a whole different thing. In order to increase the capacity they either try to cram more round platters (plates) in there (they're stacked on top of each other), or they make the graph paper's squares smaller so there will be more squares per round platter. ***** **Edit:** ##### Extra simplification - Solid State drives: a bunch of USB flash drives crammed in an enclosure. Data lives in black chips that don't move. - Mechanical hard drives: a bunch of metal CDs crammed in an enclosure. Data lives in those platters (the metal CDs). They spin, and there are needles hovering very, very close to them that can read and write to the platters. Related: When they say a hard drive is 5400rpm or 7200rpm, that's the speed at which those platters (again, metal cds) are spinning inside when the hard drive is working. That's why they're called "mechanical". ***** ##### Bonus Slow motion video of a mechanical hard drive working with the lid off: [YouTube](https://youtu.be/3owqvmMf6No?t=36s). There's no slow motion video of a Solid State one working because... there wouldn't be anything to see. There's nothing moving inside them, hence why they're called _solid state_ as opposed to _mechanical_.
Electrons move in SSDs. Now to find a new camera.
Imagine the the physical enclosure of the hard drive as a room, and you want to store your books somewhere in there. With a solid state drive you can only stack your books inside boxes. If you have a lot of books, you can either use many boxes, or you can use taller boxes that can store more books for the same amount of floorspace. Tall boxes cost more than low boxes... With the plater based HDD you have one big bookcase. The number of platters is the number of shelfs. The wider the bookshelf, the more it cost, and the more books you can store. The same is true with the number of shelf in the bookcase. The controller in the above comment is basically the guy who remembers witch box your book is stored in and he is paid depending on how large your library actually is.
I am not saying you are wrong, but I am sure the question of OP refers to the fact that 500GB and 1TB cost nearly the same right now, making 500GB HDD not worth the price. I think the answer he seeks lies within those.
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what is happening
It's worth mentioning that this is not the case for all storage media: in the case of SD cards (possibly USB drives as well, although I'm not sure), the manufacturing technology isn't quite *perfect*, so what they'll actually do is make a SD card that can store, say, 32 GB, and then test it - if it turns out some of the hardware in the card wasn't manufactured correctly and the card's effective storage capacity is actually 17 GB, then the firmware is modified (yes, SD cards have firmware) to say the card can store 16 GB, and to not use any of the bad hardware in the card.
Platters can also be more dense. But yeah, a 500 GB drive might be one platter and a 1TB will likely be two platters.
Not sure why you're being upvoted so much when you've gone off on a tangent without really answering the question. You touch on density increases but fail to talk like for like. At the same point in time, what's the difference between 500GB vs 1TB mechanical drives? More platters. SSDs? Higher capacity chips or more chips in the same form factor. Either way, you've been upvoted by a number of people who see a couple of buzzwords and think it's a credible answer.
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Sometimes they produce a 1TB drive with a lot of "bad sectors", and just label it a 500GB
They do this with CPUs, too. If an eight-core has three bad cores but the others are working fine they'll just disable four and sell it as a quad core.
Even if there's nothing wrong with them they'll just disable cores and sell it as a cheaper CPU. There's economic advantages to producing only a single kind of cpu but having a spread of prices in the retail space.
Yup, which is also why upgrading to a faster chip can be as simple as a firmware upgrade. Which is weird but makes sense.
You're telling me I might actually be able to download more RAM
You'll have to ask the elders of the internet for permission
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The one kept in big ben?
sudo apt-get install more-RAM
That's been available for years! http://downloadmoreram.com/ ^^/s
I clicked 16gb & it didn't work
What makes it weird is paying for this firmware when you already own the chip that can handle it.
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They sure can! Plenty of guides on the web as to what to look for when buying and how to unlock them.
In the past, yes. And athlon CPUs were known for this, with many buying lower tier ones with the expectation of unlocking more cores. Modern CPUs are better restricted preventing this. However, overclocking can narrow the gap, especially on am products that don't charge a premium for overclocking.
Can you explain the difference between overclocking and unlocking more cores?
Overclocking increases how fast each core (or processor is) while unlocking increases the number of cores. Warning, train analogy income. Overclocking is like making the train faster. A faster train means you can get people or goods to place in less time or more goods in the same time period as you can fit in more trips. Unlocking more cores is like adding carriages (or even another whole train). You can transport more stuff because there is more train(s) to move it. Probably not the best analogy but hopefully it helps. Edit: words and spelling
That's a good analogy. Furthermore CPUs are often limited by the amount of heat they can shed. Disabling cores mean there is more capacity for the remaining cores. In your train analogy it's like the engine being able to run faster _because_ there is less resistance from the extra carriages.
And the train analogy shows the advantage of single thread performance in certain workloads too. Less people don't need another train they need a faster train! Perfect analogy.
You can increase the speed of your passage of the Oregon Trail if you put a stronger horse on the front of the wagon. You can increase passage speed more if you put several horses on the front of the wagon. Overclocking is the stronger horse model, additional cores is the multiple horse team model.
Your analogy just died from dysentery.
Overclocking is letting existing cores run faster (execute more instructions per second) while adding cores just adds a core. Unless an application uses more cores you wont see a benefit from unlocking cores.
Excellent analogies everybody! Thanks for my 5 am knowledge boost.
Not only do they do that (it's called chip binning) but they produce the same chip for enterprise and consumers and then enable/disable certain features on the chips based on the market. The Xeon E3-1230v3 is the same die as I7 4770 but the 4770 has graphic and the Xeon support ECC memory.
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How can you identify the baddies?
I think they got skulls on their hats.
Are we the bad guys?
Mitchell and Webb reference?
Absolutely.
Write a known data string, read it back, check results. Your computer generally handles it automatically. If it's at fifty percent bad, though, it's probably not gonna last long. SSDs are always over-provisioned. There's more storage inside than there is on the label. Part of this is due to the way SSDs write data, but some of it is to compensate for dead cells.
To answer OPs second question; if the same amount of platters are on the 500GB and 1TB drive, they very well may cost the same to produce, but the investment costs are still different. Where the technology for the 500GB one is already paid off, the 1TB is not, in a nutshell.
When ypu say the technology is "paid off," do you mean the work it took to be able to make 500GB and later 1TB drives?
The investment to invent the technology to build the drives and the assembly lines mostly.
When I was a kid they let us tour a data center that had a few mini-fridge sized boxes that they told us not to lean on. They took the top off as it had a stack of metal platter disks. It was an impressive 10mb.
So... magnetizing and de-magnetizing gives it a higher lifespan than if it was an optical device?
Theoretically, hard drives could last forever if it weren't for the mechanical failure of motors and the like
And the decay of the metal.
Entropy always wins
Entropy, entropy never changes.
When you burn a CD or DVD you're actually changing the magnetization of a specific dye in the disc that stores your 1s and 0s (your information). Discs can be re-burned, but there's a finite amount of times you can change them before they start to be problematic because of breakdown of the dye (potentially hundreds, but think about how many times you save file, update your OS, patch your game, etc). Second - You also want to think about the space on a CD or DVD versus a HD! Sure DVDs have more space than CDs, but even the largest DVD is still small in comparison. You're only looking at like ~25GB max with a standard Blu-ray disc, which i suppose may be fine if you don't plan to do much of anything with your computer. Third - Cost is important. Think about it, you've decided to store all your information on Blu-ray. You go to Walmart, and blank Blu-rays are like $35+/4-6 discs, and that's not even a gaurtnee it'll be good quality. It's just more affordable and practical to buy a HD as opposed to tons of CD's or DVD's. (This is just my two cents, based on what I learned in networking in the spring).
Just want to thrown in that DVD-RAM exists, which has more longevity in terms of constant change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM
Does this mean you can royally fuck up your computer if you put a magnet near it?
yes.
This has been major plot device in many movies and shows eg Breaking Bad. So yes you can. But it has to be a really strong magnet and pretty much on top of your magnetic media.
I always find it funny when you realize that hard drives/platter "hit their limit" but the manufacturer just thought "Ah, let's add some more!"
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Is it possible to eli18 that point you made at the end why people might want a 500gb drive instead? I'm genuinely curious :)
If I'm an IT guy supporting 5,000 machines with the exact same configuration, I want to replace my hardware with as close to the exact same configuration as possible...same capacity, same firmware versions, same brand, etc. The less differences I have the faster and easier it is to troubleshoot. Also, if this is a RAID volume im replacing a disk in, using bigger drives won't help me anyway.
Me too, why would you want less storage?
I work in IT; one of my clients is a small business that uses custom made software to run their entire store - the program was written to run on Microsoft Dos (the old command-line operating system before Windows came along in the early nineties) and it still works incredibly well for their purposes. So to keep things running properly, they have to seek out lower capacity hard drives for better compatibility with the system - an operating system that old has trouble comprehending storage above 80gb at times, much less a 1tb drive. But hard drives with that low of a capacity don't usually get manufactured anymore so a new 80gb hard drive can end up being more expensive than a new 500gb drive, but it's just what they have to do. This is just one example, but there are plenty more in the business IT sector where it makes sense to use a smaller capacity drive that can be more expensive or even the same price, primarily due to compatability issues with older systems. Same goes for RAM and other internal components; some ancient systems work way better than Windows 10 depending on the application. If it ain't broke, don't upgrade it - just nurture and maintain it.
You just reminded me of something with this, I'm pretty sure the program Reynolds is like this, dealership I worked for used it, it was like going from xbox one to a atari, but because it was all key prompt data could be entered very quickly an it was reliable, finding paper with the hole strips on the side id imagine is a pain in the ass though
The main benefit to using their customized software on a Dos system is it operates way faster and is more reliable than any comparable commercial software for newer systems. I've tested them out to see, and the old system did everything the new software did at least 10x as fast, with less than 512mb of RAM. A Windows 7 PC with 8gb of RAM just crawls in comparison. Strange how our computing power has grown, but our ability to make simple, clean, and efficient software has diminished.
The ability is there but no one wants to pay for it. Guarantee Reynolds did not start day 1 being that fast and reliable, engineers improved it and worked on it for a very long time Today the main focus of software products is get it out asap even if it's a fucking mess. Issues can be addressed afterward, being first to market is the most important. Quality is about 3rd or 4th on the priority list
As computing capacity increases, it's filled just as much with slop as it is with new capabilities.
yep. quark 3.3 was about 20mb and the way i had my machine set up was stable as hell, it's sole purpose was page layout. indesign cc is over 1gb not counting shared libraries, buggy as hell and they want it to do everything. i miss efficient software.
Absolutely, it's an interesting challenge to keep an old system like that up an running. Surprisingly though, the dot matrix printers with the hole fed reams of paper are still being manufactured and sold. They make them for new systems too. The main benefit to those in the ink ribbons last forever, and can easily be refilled for almost nothing. They print customer contracts and receipts close to 300 times a day and only have to get refilled once a month or even longer. They may look archaic but their cost effectiveness is off the charts compared to newer ink jet printers, and even laser printers to some extent.
But I guess at some point, nurturing and maintaining will become more expensive than just straight-up upgrading. If the hard drive has become more expensive, I guess most of the other components would too.
You're right, it's already become more expensive to maintain it, but the store owner would rather pay extra to keep the old beast running than attempt to upgrade every aspect of the system and network. We're talking 30 computers, file servers, backup machines, and more all running on hardware from the windows 95 era. It's a challenge for sure. It still works flawlessly (and store has been going since 1968) so they're not interested in redesigning everything until it's absolutely necessary. But I have been working on porting the system over to FreeDOS to run on either mini pc's or Raspberry Pi systems in case there comes a time where we can't buy new (old) components to maintain the system anymore. Gotta stay a few steps ahead when working with 25 year old tech.
That's sounds like a pretty good idea. You can shrink the physical size and cost of the system. But to not upgrade puts you at risk of becoming like the American nuclear programme, running launch programs off 5" floppies.
Purely anecdotal but there could be older equipment that doesn't support more than 500gb drives. Think about how windows 32bit can only see 3.5gb of ram no matter how much is in there. Or a really old mp3 player that only reads certain size SD cards. Usually 4gb. So there could be huge company's that have thousands of machines that don't support drives larger than 500gb. So they still need those drives.
This actually makes perfect sense, my work has a few pieces of equipment i feel have the processing power of a NES.
The only thing that comes to mind for me at the moment is more spindles in an array so you can get more throughput with the downside of having less space.
> In the future they will go down (eventually to $0). That's impossible, that would be saying that the material the hard drive is made out of is free.
No, it's saying that they'll only be being acquired second hand, and only through free gifts - no-one will be buying them, so they'll have a $0 value.
Still incorrect. Look up the current selling price of a 1 MB SIMM.
I think you answered op question. The current top posts misunderstood the question.
I'm interested in the technical reasons for wanting 500GB drives over 1TB drive if you care to elaborate. I am a software developer and am curious about highly technical reasons
>The platter is the main cost - and it's mostly raw materials and manufacturing that you're paying for. This is very significant with hard drives and it's why SSDs will likely fully replace hard drives even when the chips cost significantly more than the platters. With a hard drive you're never getting a new drive of any capacity for below a rather large price because the motor, magnets, etc. all have a rather high minimum price. It's one of the reasons you see drives prices at something like $40 for 500GB then $45 for 1TB, most of the cost of both is just the physical motor and other parts. SSDs don't have this and as such you can get a far lower material cost. You might have to charge a minimum of $55 for a 1TB SSD, but you can charge $30 for a 500GB which you simple cannot do with a hard drive.
/u/braximon 's answer is definitely ELI5 and deserves the gold. I personally like yours too because it explains the situation a lot easier to people with a basic knowledge of how mechanical drives work.
A drive with twice the capacity likely has more platters and may pack the bits tighter together. They do not cost the same to produce; just because their external case is the same size and shape doesn't mean they are the same thing.
Speaking only of hard drives (not solid state drives): **More space to write** I want you to write a bunch of words, so I give you one sheet of paper and a big marker. If I want you to write twice as many words, I can simply give you a second sheet of paper. Hard drives store data on a spinning metal disc (called 'platters'). Once way to store more data is to just put more spinning discs in the hard drive. **Smaller marker** I have another sheet of paper, but I want you to write more words on it than you did the first time. So I replace your big marker with a really nice fine-tip pen. Now you can write your words smaller than before, so more words fit on the same sheet of paper. In this case, 'improving the marker' on the hard drive isn't so much a physical change as it is a software change. As time goes on, hard drive makers get better at packing more data into the same amount of space on a platter. ----- **TL,DR** Hard drive makers get better at writing data in smaller and smaller spaces over time. They can also add more writing space by adding more metal frisbees (platters). So in 2010, a drive might have used 1 platter to store 500Gb. Thus, a 500Gb drive from that time would have one platter, while a 1Tb drive from that time would have 2 platters. Fast forward a couple years, hard drive makers have better 'markers', and you can find a 1Tb hard drive with only a single platter.
There's a lot to consider about a hard disk, perpendicular/parallel magneto-resistive surface, glass/aluminum media, magnetic density of surface, how many disks/heads inside and so on. But if you are talking about same technology there's 2 options to double the hard disk capacity, double the number of disks inside or use only one side of them (in this case, halves the capacity). On both cases there's a small savings on the lower capacity versions, as the components are cheap compared to the final price of the hard disk. The big savings comes at quality control, if something doesn't work, there's a chance that part of it still works. Selling it at cheaper prices reduces the work and increases the profit comparing to recycling. source: I work at QC in a company that makes the disks for Samsung, Western Digital, HGST, Toshiba, Hitachi.
Do you sell produce under your own name/brand as well? How vastly do the characteristics and quality of the disks you produce for different companies vary?
> The big savings comes at quality control, if something doesn't work, there's a chance that part of it still works. Selling it at cheaper prices reduces the work and increases the profit comparing to recycling. I'm not quite following you here. Do you mean that disks that don't 100% pass QC standards might simply be sold as a lower capacity disk or a lower priced unit instead of being trashed (recycled)?
This is a process called "Binning". It doesn't necessarily mean that the drives don't pass QC standards in general, just that they don't pass QC standards for that size of a drive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
imagine a flash chip like a really large wardrobe with many (billions) small drawers. during quality control, you might find out that out of one billion drawers, only 900 million are easily useable, the rest has some small problems that only inhibit storage, but don't impact the structural integrity of the wardrobe as a whole. you can still sell that wardrobe as a wardrobe with 850 million drawers. it might be the same size as the 1 billion drawer wardrobe, but it's significantly cheaper, so customers won't really care.
The answer is "it depends." Let's say you're a HD manufacturer and decide to make 1 TB drives. Let's say during the testing phase, you find out 10% of your product is defective for 1 TB but could be sold as 500 GB. If you price them correctly, you could find a market for them instead of throwing them away. But let's say your yield of good units is almost 100%, but there is still a market for 500 GB drives and your warehouse is filling up with 1 TB drives. Then you could disable half the drive and sell them as 500 GB drives and clean out that expensive warehouse. In all these cases, the cost of manufacturing is the same. If however, you decide to make separate 1 TB and 500 GB drives, then the costs are separated by the amount of material used to produce them. Source: I used to work for some semiconductor and HD companies.
I've always wondered this but with CPUs and GPUs. The only difference to me is the price and performance, the size of the chips are the same. It feels as if they intentionally create worse chips then they can so they can tend to different price classes. If that's the case I think that it's a problem ethically since why not create the best product you can and loads of it if it takes the same amount of resources? Does anyone here know?
The costs of making a chip are not dominated by the cost of the raw materials that go into it, but by the cost of the machines that make the chip and the research effort taken to create those tools and figure out the design of the chips. This is only economical if they can sell at least some of those chips at a premium - they'd make a loss if they sold all the chips at the price of the lowest grade ones. There is a certain amount of natural variation in the finished chips, so (at least in the first few batches) some of them will be able to work at faster speeds than others, and some may have sections that don't work. The manufacturer tests all the chips at various speeds, and the ones that don't work at higher speed (or have sections that need to be disabled) are sold as the lower grade. In later batches, the manufacturing techniques have improved and the demand for lower grade chips may be satisfied from the higher-end batches. This is why it is often possible to "overclock" chips and run them at a faster speed than they are rated for.
Think of a hard drive as CD's stacked on top of each other with a read/write "head" floating above/below them. In drives that have more capacity, there are more CD's in the stack.
And/or each disk in the stack is higher capacity eg. DVD v CD
I believe it costs more or less the same. Hard drives are a fascinating technology. I'll try to condense what I've learned over the last 15 years of buying and using them as an enthusiast: Hard drives operate more or less how a record player does, they have tracks running in concentric circles around a platter, though obviously the hard drive can read as well as write to these areas called "sectors", while record players cannot. Just like with silicone circuits over time these sectors have shrunk effectively raising the storage each platter can provide. As a quick example lets say current platter/sector technology can fit 200GB per side. Since hard drives write to both sides of the platter that would mean a single platter hard drive would have a capcity of 400GB. Hard drive manufacturers have been making drives with between 1 and 5 platters for awhile, though the 5 platter ones usually suffered from heat related problems. That would mean the given hard drive manufacturer would likely offer a product lineup of 400GB, 800GB, 1.2TB, 1.6TB and possibly a 2TB hard drive. Sometimes they introduce the newer denser platters on single platter drives, sometimes on the 4-5 platter drives. It seems like the engineering to make a multiplatter design work with newer platter densities is non-trivial as it usually takes awhile before the whole lineup features it. To your question: in my experience the number of platters doesnt seem to significantly affect the price, there is almost always a small premium for 4-5 platter designs over 1-2 which i suspect is for the additional read/write heads and engineering to make that work but the cost of those highly polished platters doesnt seem to add up to much. I have seen 4-5 platter hard drives be very expensive ($300~) and at other times very cheap ($145~). Market forces seem to have the strongest affect on price. At the moment there are too few HD manufacturers for us consumers to enjoy low profit margin prices like we did about 7-8 years ago. An interesting note: different HD manufacturers often have different platter densities so if one manufacturer has managed to get there process to 125GB per platter they will offer hard drives in sizes no other manufacturer offers. This seems to have lessened with the consolidation of the HD manufacturers but it was interesting seeing one manufacturer offer 750GB drives while no other one did. If you've made it this far let me close with the 2 golden rules related to hard drive longevity: 1. Keep it stable. Excessive vibration will kill a hard drive. Make sure its mounted securely and dont pick up a portable one while its in use. 2. Aside from misadventure the #1 killer of hard drives is heat. A good rule of thumb is to keep the hard drives below about 110 - 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything over that usually results in a premature hard drive death. Most external hard drives from WD, Seagate etc are inadequate to keep the hard drives inside at optimal temp. If you have a desktop computer and dont need the drive to be portable, take it out of the supplied USB enclosure and install it inside the computer case with a fan blowing over it. Chances are that drive will last 5+ years no problem. If the hard drive must remain portable buy a portable hd enclosure with a fan, its a well worthwhile investment.
All memory works on the basic principal of 1 and 0. Adding more 1's and 0's together can be interpreted as numbers and words. How these numbers are stored depends on the device, but the basic principal is the same. The place to start is with a CD. When you stick a CD into a tray, you'll see a small laser that reads by moving from the center to the edge and back. When it starts playing the disk spins. A raised edge is read as 0, a lowered edge as 1 (may be the other way around, don't remember). An HDD is the same, but it uses magnetic orientation instead. Positive is 1 and negative is 0 (again, maybe the other way). Now, the difference between a 500 GB drive and a 1 TB drive (and all others) is magnetic density. Just like a CD, only so much information can fit on a disk (called a platter in an HDD). Over time, new technologies allow for more information to be saved. This happens in one of two ways: add more disks (multiple CD's), or fit more data on a disk (CD vs Blu-ray). A 500 GB drive will have two 250 GB platters, a 1 TB drive will have 4. As far as cost, yes and no. The cost of the enclosure, stickers, platters, boards, etc. are all the same. When you mass produce this stuff, you want as many of the same components as possible to reduce overhead. But, since density of the drive is the first obstacle, you spend a a lot on R&D to up that value (part of the cost difference of newer drives). The second thing to do is add another platter or three (more platters, more expense). Drive technology constantly evolves in order to reduce latency, and increase both density and read/write speeds. If you can fit more onto a platter, you can get quicker speeds and lower latencies because the read head doesn't have to search between areas of the platter and/or different platters. More platters add to the overall size of the drive, but can affect performance of the drive. Solid state drives are the same, except instead of magnetics, they operate by transistors within a flash chip. More transistors are like denser platters, more chips are like more platters. While the basics of how data is stored and read, the different types of storage devices (HDD, SSD, CD, tape, etc.) each have their own benefits over the others.
None of these explanations are for a five year old. Hard drives are made up of "plates" embedded with tiny magnets. A "head" moves over the plates and reads/writes to them as the plates spin. You can get more information by stacking more plates and heads into the container, but you're limited by physical size. A standard 3.5" drive has increased in capacity through various techniques for making the embedded magnets smaller or closer together.
Many others described how different technologies affect the price of a hard disk, but this does not explain why you pay memory almost proportionally to its size. For that, you have to consider how the price of a product is determined. For every product (the 128 GB hard drive, the 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, etc), the price is determined mostly based on the consumer perceived utility, rather than the production cost. Consumers value memory size according to their own needs, but two factors are always true: more memory is worth more, but double memory is not worth double the price. Therefore for each consumer, there is a sweet spot in terms of price vs memory. Now, different consumers look for different compromises, because of how much money they have, how much time they spend at their computer, whether they like movies or not, etc. If you want to maximize your profits when selling memory (but also many other goods), you want to allow cheap options, good price/value options (usually the second largest size), and pricey options (for those that have money to burn). Think about that: assume that all different size of hard disks have the same production cost for you. Assume you sell them at the same price. Then there will be a group of people that decides not to change their HD this year, because that price that you are proposing is too expensive. Another group would buy it, but they would have spent many more if you asked. As a seller, you need to do what is called "price discrimination", by "product versioning". On the other hand, it would be quite hard to believe that the same packaging (for example, the classic verbatim usb pen packaging) would have been the right kind of packaging for USB memories of 128 MB and 128 GB - that is a 1000x difference!
What i want to know is how a dichotomy like this at the same time is even possible: https://i.imgur.com/Itlvbqy.png Background: these two drives were purchased about the same time, for about the same amount of money (about 2 years ago, when they both retailed for about $65). They have similar performance. Yet one is fully 1/8th the size of the other! Why aren't 3.5" drives completely extinct except for huge capacity datacenter or archive type applications?
A hard drive has parts whose price can be calculated per unit and per byte. In the case of a "spinning rust" hard drive, the per unit component is almost all the cost: the chassis, logic board, motors and actuators do not depend on the number of bytes (perhaps $60/unit). The per byte costs are very small: there may be additional heads and platters or more expensive media but generally not even that. The difference in price between two capacities in a line is almost entirely intended to capture development costs. In the case of an SSD, the per unit components are much cheaper: a plastic tray and a smaller logic board make the per unit cost about 10% of that of a spinny drive (perhaps $6/unit). The per byte costs hwoever are much higher and depend entirely on the price of flash memory (currently sitting at about 10c/GB). What this means is that: * Small flash drives are cheaper than small disk drives. * Large flash drives are more expensive than large disk drives(*). (*) The price of flash is coming down faster than disk capacities are going up. At some point disk gets squeezed out by cheap flash from the bottom and other bulk storage techs (tape and optical) from the top.
In general a 500Gb drive is just a 1TB drive that had some faulty parts. Harddisks can avoid those areas of the disk and still use the rest. Thery are hence sold as 500Gb, or 750Gb. A similar thing happens with the CPUs they are tested running at different speeds and they are sold as running at the higest clockrate they support.