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The author looks at one of the drives, but they bought 2. What size was the other one? It may just be that there's some distribution of "usable flash blocks" i
by leoedin 4y ago
The author looks at one of the drives, but they bought 2. What size was the other one?
It may just be that there's some distribution of "usable flash blocks" in every flash chip, and they happened to get one which fell at the bottom end of the acceptable range. You'd have to sample quite a few before you could be certain this isn't just an outlier.
- fluoridation 4y agoIt's clearly stated. One is 16 billion bytes, the other is 15.4 billion bytes.
- Dylan16807 4y agoThey got two new ones. But it would be very weird if different drives in the same batch had different capacities. That's a lot of wasted effort.
- danielheath 4y agoNot strange at all; first they make the batch, then they test them to see how many of the bits are actually writable, and sort them according to how well they turned out. This is also how phone screens are made (a huge panel is produced, then lit up; some pixels are stuck, but phone-screen-sized pieces can be cut out of it where there's enough good pixels). This is also how most CPUs and GPU models are made - test each sub-component, disable the parts that fail testing, then price the result according to how much of it works.
- sseagull 4y agoYep. This is very common and is called binning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
- Dylan16807 4y agoBut they were in the same bin.
- danielheath 4y agoRight, but all that means is they met the minimum standards for that bin and didn’t meet the minimum standards for the next one.
- leoedin 4y agoAs far as I can see the author now owns 4 memory sticks, but only looked at the flash on 2 of them.
- hddherman 4y agoI bought two of the same model from the same retailer and the other one reported the exact same capacity.