Digital storage units in today's consumer products

As the years go by, it seems more and more likely that the future of storage is in the cloud, but until this future comes, most digital consumer products have their own (local) storage units. These units can be mechanical (HDD, CD/DVD/Blu-ray) or solid state (eMMC, SSD, flash memory card, USB flash drive).

1. Tablets and smartphones

In small form factor gadgets storage cinsists of chips. One soldered, internal chip, and one removable, in the form of a microSD card, which is also technically one chip.

2. Laptops and AIO desktops

There are four different places in a laptop/AIO, where storage units are/can be installed:

1. in a mSATA/M.2 slot on the mainboard
2. in a standard 2.5" drive bay
3. in the optical drive bay, using a bay adapter
4. in a standard 2.5" drive bay, using a 2.5" to mSATA slot adapter

In the mSATA/M.2 slots and the 2.5" to mSATA adapter you can only install SSD units, while the simple 2.5" drive bays can house classic laptop hard drives, SSDs, SSHDs or mSATA SSDs (with the use of an adapter).

*Laptops usually have an integrated SD card reader, but it's becoming less and less practical, as most devices can transfer files to USB sticks and/or wirelessly. 

3. Desktop PCs

The latest mid range to high end mainboards have an on-board M.2 slot, which are extremely fast, but there are also standard PCI-Express card size SSDs, which install in x4 or x8 slots and offer the highest read/write speeds.

In an average desktop PC there's a lot of space, so you can add as many 2.5"/3.5" HDDs, SSDs and SSHDs as you want, assuming you have enough SATA ports available. You can also use mSATA/M.2 to PCI-Express adapter cards to add 1-8 SSDs on one card, increasing speed and/or capacity. 

4. Consoles (XBOX ONE/PS4)

These quite advanced consoles are basically computers, based on AMD APUs, so the same rules should apply as for laptops, but they also have an internal flash chip for the OS. That said, if you're trying to replace the standard HDD storage unit with a bigger/faster one or with an SSD, you may run into software compatibility issues, while the hardware should theoretically work. This was/is a serious problem in some laptops, which work with a few specific hard drive models, and reject anything else ...

In the future we can expect SSDs to win the high capacity race too, as the physical limitations of magnetic disc based storage are more and more evident. The standard NAND flash memory may be replaced by newer technologies, but they'll still be chips with no moving parts.

Some of the best Tech-Tubers

In the past few years I found TV to be very boring, so I began to spend more and more time on Youtube, searching for interesting videos, mostly about technology.

One of my favorite youtubers is Matthias Wandel, who builds all kinds of extremely practical stuff out of wood and thrown away furniture. The most impressive aspect of his videos IMHO is that all of his woodworking machines are actually built and/or improved by him - almost nothing in his workshop is store bought.

Linus Media Group is a relatively small production company, which mostly makes videos about consumer electronics, PCs and networking gear. They filmed quite interesting move vlogs too, about the difficulties they've faced while moving to a bigger and better office, and they also go live every friday with The WAN Show - a show about tech news and life.

Tek Syndicate is another tech channel, with lots of humor and intelligent debates. Their weekly show is The Tek with Logan and Wendell (and guests), but Logan also hosts (monthly?) a Q&A show called inbox.exe and his girlfriend, Pistol, appears in WASD with 1-2 guests (bi-monthly?). They are also organising a LAN party in Seattle, for which you can buy tickets for 75 USD until the end of the year, after that it's 90 USD.

JayzTwoCents earned my respect by doing most of the work alone. He doesn't have a camera man, a proper studio or a video editing crew (like Linus Media Group has :P). Jay's speciality is water cooling and video cards, but you'll find all kinds of videos on his channel, including his weekly live show with Barnacules Nerdgasm - Tech Talk.

Barnacules is a more adventurous tech tuber, as he worked for 15 years at Microsoft. Now, after getting fired, he does a lot more of 3D printing, CNC, vlogs, unboxings,  plays with drones ...etc.

Paulshardware and Kyle's Awesomehardware Network started at the same time. They both worked at NeweggTV, and decided to make videos by themselves. They also do a weekly live show, which is pretty well organised, with clearly defined segments and duration.

UnboxTherapy is completely different from the previous channels. It's mainly focused on professional unboxings, done right, with appropriate lighting and cameras.

So these are my personal favorites, but there are a lot more interesting tech tubes out there. Which one is your favorite? Feel free to leave a comment below. You can support this blog by shopping at Amazon.com through the affiliate links shown in/above this post (please disable adblock on this page to correctly display the non-annoying ads i've selected for you).

RAM in today's consumer products

The architecture of RAM chips has stayed the same for tens of years, even if they were produced on smaller and smaller technologies. Things are finally changing, in the sense that the PC industry finally adopted stacked memory modules for graphics cards. Other PC components and consumer electronics still use single layer RAM chips, so let's take a look at some memory placements.

1. Desktop computers

In custom built desktop PCs and in most brand name PCs the RAM chips are soldered onto small circuit boards, which are installed into memory slots on the motherboard, close to the CPU. These chips are usually single layer, but large capacity stacked chips are coming very soon.

All-in-one desktop computers (and mini PCs) usually come with SODIMM (laptop) memory, because they use less power and take up less space. Some manufacturers use a slightly different approach - trying to save a couple of bucks on the slots - they solder the chips right onto the motherboard and maybe install one memory slot for future upgrades.

2. Laptop/Notebook/Netbook Computers

Laptop computers come with SODIMM slots, soldered memory chips or both (just like AIO/Mini computers).

3. Smartphones and tablets

Smartphones and tablets are practically complete computers, with all the main components. Usually we find one or two RAM chips on the logic board right next to the processor (SoC). In the latest gadgets the RAM and Flash NAND storage are combined into the same chip by stacking.

This is the logic board of the Apple iPad Pro, which is arguably a high end tablet PC. A smartphone's logic board looks about the same, but is much smaller and usually has just one RAM chip.

4. Video cards

The average laptop and desktop video card uses GDDR3 or GDDR5 RAM chips, soldered onto the video card, around the graphics processor.

This is the latest nVidia video card, called the Geforce GTX 980Ti. As you can see, a large board surface area is occupied by the RAM chips, even though the total is just 6GB of GDDR5.
AMD and Intel have improved their memory technology, by using stacked memory chips (called HBM) and installing them onto the same interposer as the GPU or integrated GPU (in Intel CPUs).

This is the AMD Radeon R9 Nano video card, which uses stacked HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). It has 4 stacks of four layer RAM chips, which add up to 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory.

Intel chose to integrate a single eDRAM chip right next to the Iris Pro iGPU. Depending on the model number, the iGPU can have 64MB or 128MB of so-called L4 cache, which caches textures, improving 3D graphics performance by up to 200%, compared to an equivalent iGPU without its own memory.

5. Gaming Consoles XBOX/PlayStation

The most recent generation of gaming consoles use custom octa-core AMD APUs with 8GB of RAM.

Sony went with the the Jaguar octa-core AMD APU and 8GB of GDDR5 memory in the PlayStation 4, while Microsoft chose to integrate some eDRAM on the AMD APU and use 8GB of moch slower DDR3 memory in the XBOX ONE.

In the future we can expect the whole PC/console industry to adopt one of the versions of HBM memory. Consoles and laptops will probably use an APU with HBM, while on video cards it's already confirmed that both AMD and nVidia will switch to HBM completely, once the production of these stacked high speed RAM chips really takes off.