It’s mind blowing to think that storing a terabyte of data used to cost about 100 billion dollars. Nowadays it fits on a $20 flash drive (MSRP is closer to $100)

In 1956, IBM introduced the first hard drive, the IBM 305 RAMAC, which had a storage capacity of about 5 megabytes (MB). The cost of this system was approximately $10,000 per megabyte, meaning the entire system would cost around $50,000 for just 5 MB of storage.

To calculate the cost of 1 terabyte (TB) of memory in 1956 using this rate:

• 1 TB = 1,024 GB
• 1 GB = 1,024 MB
• 1 TB = 1,024 x 1,024 MB = 1,048,576 MB

At $10,000 per MB, the cost of 1 TB would have been:

1,048,576 MB * $10,000/MB = **$10,485,760,000** (over 10 billion dollars)

So, 1 TB of storage would have cost over 10 billion dollars in 1956.

By 2020, the cost of storage had decreased dramatically due to significant technological advancements in the storage industry.

In 2020, the cost of storage was approximately $0.02 per gigabyte, which translates to $0.00002 per megabyte. Using the same calculation as before:

• 1 TB = 1,024 GB
• 1 GB = 1,024 MB
• 1 TB = 1,048,576 MB

At $0.00002 per MB, the cost of 1 TB in 2020 would have been:

1,048,576 MB * $0.00002/MB = **$20.97**

So, 1 TB of storage would have cost around $21 in 2020.

Micron Memory, a leader in worldwide supply of semiconductors, committed 15 billion dollars for the new construction of a manufacturing plant in Boise Idaho.

This new plant will be the first built in over 20 years inside the United States. In addition, it will become the only operational manufacturing facility within the United States. The 15 billion dollar investment by Micron will span the next ten years with investments inside of Boise and in other states as well.

This is the first of several planned US investments by Micron following the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act. This is the largest private investment ever made in Idaho. The new manufacturing fabrication facility will be a co-location with Micron’s Research and Development (R&D) center. Being this close to the company’s headquarters will improve operational efficiency, accelerate technology deployment, and shorten time to market.

The CHIPS and Science Act is a federal law in the United States that was passed by the 117th United States Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden on August 9, 2022. The act includes billions of dollars in new funding to boost domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing in the United States. The law is divided into three sections, each with its own short title:

• Division A is the CHIPS Act of 2022
• Division B is the Research and Development, Competition, and Innovation Act
• Division C is the Supreme Court Security Funding Act of 2022.

This endeavor will generate an estimated 17,000 new American jobs in which 2,000 will be Micron direct hires. To support Micron’s growing employee population, the company plans to open a world-class childcare facility operated by our local partners at the Treasure Valley Family YMCA across from Micron’s corporate headquarters. The center will provide STEM-based programming and easy access for parents to interact with their children during the day, as well as ease the transition for those, particularly mothers, returning to the workforce.

Boise State University, which is located less than ten minutes from Micron’s headquarters, is ranked 131 in Engineering. The press release from Micron did not mention investments or support to improve the engineering school’s rank over course of the 15 billion dollar investment. The #1 engineering school in the United States continues to be MIT (Massachusetts Institute in Technology).

I think we have all heard a USB can only be used so many times.  Some say the number is 1,000 writes – some say the number is 100,000 writes.  One thing I do know for sure, it’s impossible to tell on any one specific device.  The life cycle of a USB is directly related to the flash memory…and from model to model or style to style, who knows what quality of flash is used.  With that said, we can still explain the theory behind making USB drives last longer.  For the most part it boils down to several elements  A)  the memory type and quality and B) the wear leveling technique.

As a quick summary the NAND flash in USB can be either SLC, MLC or TLC (single cell, multi-layer cell or triple-layer cell memory).  Typically you will find MLC and now mostly TLC in USB sticks.  SLC can be found but typically on the very high end devices.

Wear leveling is a technique to prolong the life of the erasable flash memory.  To summarize, flash memory has individual, erasable segments that can be set as zero’s or ones (set as either positive or negative charge).  However, after a certain number of erase and write cycles the segment (cell) becomes too unstable for reliable use.

Wear leveling is the algorithm used by the controller on the device which attempts to arrange the erase and writes evenly across the flash medium.  Typically flash can have a cycle between 3,000 and 5,000 erase/writes.  In addition to the usable area, the flash also has some cells with specific blocks for extended live which can handle up to 100,000 writes.  This is the area where the controller makes not of the segments previously used and maps out the next best cells to use during an erase/write cycle.

There are three types of wear leveling.

No wear leveling – A Flash memory storage system with no wear leveling will not last very long if it is writing data to the flash. Without wear leveling, the Flash controller must permanently assign the logical addresses from the host computer to the physical addresses of the Flash memory. This means that every write to a previously written block must first be read, erased, modified, and re-written to the same location. This is very time consuming and highly written locations will wear out quickly with other locations even being completely unused. Once a few blocks reach their end of life the drive is no longer operable.

Dynamic wear leveling

The first developed type of leveling is called dynamic wear leveling and it uses a map to linklogicl block addresses from the host to the physical Flash memory. Each time the host writes replacement data, the map is updated so the original physical block is marked as invalid data, and a new block is linked to that map entry. Each time a block of data is re-written to the Flash memory it is written to a new location.

Static wear leveling

The other type of wear leveling is called static wear leveling which also uses a map to link the block addresses to physical memory addresses. Static wear leveling works the same as dynamic wear leveling except the static blocks that do not change are periodically moved so that these low usage cells are able to be used by other data. This rotational effect of block addressing enables an SSD to operate until most of the blocks are near their end of life.

The above are three types of wear leveling and there are three types of techniques used to extend the life of a USB drive.

Error correction

Code which is kept and logs bad blocks so they cannot be used again in future writes.

Pool reserve

Where if a write fails to a block it can be re-routed to the pool of reserved blocks and written there.

Track usage  – Blocks on the media can be tracked in a least recently used queue of some sort. The data structures for the queue itself must be wear leveled as well as this queue information is constantly changing.

Source:  Wikipedia and Nexcopy Inc. USB duplicator manufacturer.