Why are there 1TB micro SD cards that are the size fingernail and most 1TB hard drives are bigger than my hand?
In: Technology
On a computer chip, the only thing that matters is the surface layer. The silicon below the surface is just there for support, so the chip doesn’t break apart during or after manufacturing. So what they can do is to grind away the bottom of the chip until there’s just a paper thin surface layer left and glue multiple of these flattened chips into a single stack, which is still thin enough to fit into a micro SD card.
The disadvantage of this is that this doesn’t work with power hungry parts, since concentrating a lot of heat into a tiny area can easily set the thing on fire. But flash memory uses very little power, allowing it to be crammed into tiny spaces like that.
This should not be confused with MLC flash. That means multi level cell, which is a technology that allows to store more than just one bit within each individual cell.
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