This guy asks about archival - https://superuser.com/questions/374609/what-medium-should-be-used-for-long-term-high-volume-data-storage-archival
They say to buy a 30TB LTO-8 tape cartridge for $79 - https://www.networkworld.com/article/3638116/why-aren-t-optical-disks-the-top-choice-for-archive-storage.html
ROMs would be useful for storing lots of data for long periods of time without corruption or freeing up space on your SSD for more hot data, that could be automated. They should be cheap and compact. These are useful properties.
Anyone who knows about this, please chime in. I’ve been thinking about this very subject for quite some time, though I’ve never put it into words. I have, for a long time, wondered why I couldn’t find PROMs with capacities larger that a few megabytes.
Where would you buy your PROMs? I figure most ROM implementations should be relatively simple compared to other memories that actually require complex semiconductor fab methods. Maybe it’s just a scale thing.
I buy my PROMs from DigiKey.
Well I could find this on LCSC: https://www.lcsc.com/products/Non-Volatile-Memory-ROM_860.html
but I’m not finding any Chinese manufactured brand I don’t think which would be cheaper.
I’ve never seen this website before, it seems useful. Thank you.
The super cheap padauk microcontrollers are very cheap and cool. Eevlog did some videos on them. https://odysee.com/@eevblog:7/eevblog-1306-1-of-5-3-cent-padauk-micro:b
They are very cool, but they’re a bit too weak for me. I started off with an 8-bit Arduino Uno, but now use exclusively 32-bit microcontrollers. I have 5 picos that I got with a slight discount that I’m using for my projects. I really like the RP2040, so the pico is an obvious choice. Also, I don’t really use C/C++ to program my microcontrollers, I use and contribute to TinyGo, which is not going to work on the more obscure devices. However, they do seem like really nice chips for when you just want a really cheap device to perform some logic.
Yeah I’ve thought about porting Teacup firmware to an ultra cheap 3D printer board I’d make. But I think these micros are intended for cheapo products. If your product costs more than like ~$20 you might want to invest in a nicer micro. But I haven’t used them yet although I have some sitting around. I can’t comment on how good they actually are.
I’ve only really used Atmel micros but I’ve found their pricing is a little steep. Yeah there are some value Arm M0’s… GigaDevice has some riscv stuff that may be good.
I’d look on DigiKey and Mouser. I did try looking on both, but what I found is that they’re tiny in terms of capacity, so even 1TB costs insane amounts.
Because capitalists are incapable of long-term planning.
Think about how much data sits out there without every really being edited/deleted. So many large datasets including videos, revision systems, and lots of records being taken including blockchains. I wonder what percentage of the data humans put out and store can be comfortably be placed on some cheap scaled ROM like this.
I don’t see why not other than the fact that no one is using them for this use case. I’m not sure how expensive a PROM is, but if it’s not too expensive, I’d try buying a lot of them and connecting them all to a microcontroller to see if I can make some sort of mass storage with them.
The modules we have found are expensive and low capacity. So they are expensive.
NAND flash is apparently a transistor per cell??? I would expect a ROM type based on nanoscale resistors or something like that would be compact and a cheaper end cost?
The modules we have found are expensive and low capacity. So they are expensive.
Yeah, that lines up with what I saw.
NAND flash is apparently a transistor per cell??? I would expect a ROM type based on nanoscale resistors or something like that would be compact and a cheaper end cost?
I think NAND flash manufacturing is just optimized to such a degree that it’s much cheaper than everything else.
I think NAND flash manufacturing is just optimized to such a degree that it’s much cheaper than everything else.
I understand but I’m trying to make an argument that the ROMs would be significantly cheaper and more compact given the same scaling… But I wouldn’t know enough to say for sure so I’ll keep reading.
That is very much possible, but the capitalists are only going to scale what they think will get them money now, so it’s doubtful that they’re going to think long-term enough to actually do that.
Apparently someone made a patent I found on Google… https://patents.google.com/patent/CN101540318B/en
