hard drives are laughably fragile I can break them by doing this this or this and while solid stage storage is much more resistant to some of those things it is also delicate in its own way it's highly susceptible to data rot where over time your precious Family Photos your elementary school projects or your crypto keys can become corrupted or even vanish outright well that is where this comes in the blouse St storage device costs just $30 is as fast as the ram in your gaming PC is immune to Magnetic disruption is resistant to radiation and it's got unfathomable endurance remember that SSD in your computer well if you were to take that and empty it and refill it once per day it would last anywhere from about 9 months to 3 years the blouse do storage device try 2.7 billion years that's over half of the estimated age of this beautiful Rock we call Earth but there's a catch while the raw cost of this drive is just $30 hardly deserving of the crown we bestowed upon it it has a total capacity of just 8 kiloby to put that in perspective if you wanted to store one single frame of this video you're watching right now you would need three of these for a total of $90 and if you wanted to replace the 2 TB SSD in your gaming PC it would cost over7 billion excuse me is this some sort of scam who needs this on a USB how does this thing even work well I don't know but I'm going to get some answers right now where is she Hey where's our sponsor Lexar their professional workflow docs are built to accelerate your post- production process with 40 gbit per second transfer speeds thanks to Thunderbolt 4 check out their workflow series of products using our link down below listen here kid you call yourself ferroelectric but there ain't a lick of iron in you how do you explain that whoa whoa who you don't have to answer that the word ferroelectric indicates the behavior of a material rather than the presence of iron in it let me put it in terms of donut eater like you can understand magnetic materials have domains that contain dipoles usually these are randomly oriented but if you organize the domains so their dipoles are aligned well you've got yourself a magnet the same idea works for Ferro electrics but in place of an influencing magnetic field it's influenced by an electric current this ability to manipulate the state of domains allows us to store data store data I don't think so he just said he was Ram people like that they're too volatile to store data are you profiling my client right now I'm just saying if you Google flash memory versus Ram pretty much every result's going to tell you flash memory is nonvolatile meaning it can store data even when it's unpowered and random access memory is volatile that's a false dichotomy and you know it let's talk about why it's called Ram originally it was to differentiate from sequential Access Memory where you can only read things in a specific order think like a VHS movie or a cassette tape you got to fast forward or rewind to get the stuff you want that's essentially how all forms of long-term storage work but with varying speeds and techniques by contrast Ram allows any individual bit of information to be accessed directly the volatility of RAM is not an inherent characteristic but a side effect of the modern Technologies we use to make it okay sorry can we just drop this bit it's been going kind of long you could call it a kilo bit get out but just because he's gone doesn't mean we're done talking about Ferro El electric RAM and what makes it so special Fe Ram uses microscopic crystals that contain an atom floating within their structure by applying an electric current we can move the atom's position within the crystal this represents a bit one or zero the reason it is so durable is because unlike nand flash which uses electrons to store bits electrons that are desperate to find their way back to equilibrium the crystal contains the entire atom and for practical purposes that atom is entirely at rest in either position so feam is about as nonvolatile as it gets not only not requiring power for data retention but also retaining that data unpowered for hundreds of years when stored correctly now there are some additional gas to write a single bit the entire storage device needs to be completely overwritten for instance but luckily as long as your microcontroller can handle the throughput it can do that virtually instantaneously making Fe Ram great for scenarios where the power could be cut at any moment think like data logging for an aircraft or a military vehicle which is all super interesting but uh what's the deal with this F Ram USB stick let me show you how it works it's got out of the box support for Unix based systems but if you're on Windows you're going to need to do a quick tear down to flash the firmware luckily I've got all the tools I need in my cargo pants from LTT store.com while we're in here by the way why don't we take a look at the guts it's got a Raspberry Pi microcontroller a 4 mbte nor flash chip to store firmware and our Fe Ram chip once we Flash the firmware we can access it like this it has an on device text editor where you can jot down anything you like as long as it fits in 8,000 bytes which by default is yep about 8,000 characters so what would you use it for well most likely long-term storage of critical information like say a really important phone number that you really don't want to forget or more likely crypto keys or passwords uh another option would be to make a time capsule that could be read long into the future it only stores text out of the box but theoretically you could use a hex Editor to store whatever kind of data you want on this thing the only question then is okay we've got this technology that has the fast reads and wrs of dram is nonvolatile has practically Limitless endurance and is immune to electromagnetic disruption oh and I didn't even mention it uses a fraction of the power why aren't we using it for everything it comes down to density a single sheet of paper can fit about 10,000 characters at 12o font size that represents the density of a high-capacity SSD for comparison Fe Ram is about 250,000 times less dense that means that the size of one of the characters on this page would cover more than 18 city blocks in Chicago and my memo would be about three times the size of New York City so realistically you're probably better off making a quarter million copies and hoping at least one survives but hold on you might be thinking flash memory came from similarly humble beginnings with early chips also being limited to just kilobytes of storage how do we know that feam isn't the future well it's the crystals the crystals in current ferroelectric Ram can't hold their states if they get too small meaning that they will no longer be able to store any data at all now there is active Research into various non-volatile Ram including new phero electric materials that could scale smaller but the question is why would companies bother investing in this Tech our large scale computer systems are currently well served by traditional forms of RAM and storage even if longevity is is a problem that everyone's just kind of ignoring for the time being or well not everyone there are multiple long-term storage solutions that come in much larger capacities like ultrium tape and mdisk but both of those require initial investments in Hardware in order to read and write them and they operate on the assumption that that Hardware will still exist when the time comes to read them now you could argue that the blouse doall storage device has the same problem given that the onboard flash memory and the microcontroller are both likely to die long before the Fe Ram will but here's the cool thing you actually don't need either of those things to access the data that's stored on the F Ram should any other components become obsolete or non-functional you can interact directly with the F Ram using an sop8 test clip whether it's the year 2050 or 1950 which I only bring up as a possibility because the folks at mcdine who manufactured the blow storage device also brought brought it up the bottom line is this Tech is pretty cool and if you've made it this far into a dense nerdy video you are too so to reward you and also to prove just how durable this thing is we're going Segway to our sponsor delete me with the Black Friday business coming to an end I'm sure you're all tired of those cold calls with a special deal just for you but instead of declining the call every time have you ever stopped and wondered how they even got your number in the first place well that's something our sponsor delete me can help answer and even help with see sometimes your information gets sold online to data brokers who in turn go and sell it to yappy MC yappers so they can try and take all your hard-earned cash but by feeding delete me the information you want to keep private they can scour the web and ask for it to be you guessed it deleted and it's not just your info you can keep all your loved ones protected too thanks to their family plans each member gets their own data sheet and managing their profiles is a breeze thanks to the detailed yet simple to navigate dashboard so add another tool to help protect your privacy online go to our Link in the description and use code lt20 for 20% off a delete me plan that fits your needs if you guys enjoyed this video why not check out the one we did on cam a turbo nerdy dive into what could be the future of mainstream memory