Hard drives are laughably fragile. I can break them by doing this, this, or this. And while solid-state storage is much more resistant to some of those things, it is also delicate in its own way. It's highly susceptible to data rot, where over time your precious family photos,

your elementary school projects, or your crypto keys can become corrupted or even vanish outright. Well, that is where this comes in. The blouse storage device costs just $30, is as fast as the RAM in your gaming PC, is immune to magnetic disruption, is resistant to radiation, and

it's got unfathomable endurance. Remember that SSD in your computer? Well, if you were to take that and empty it and refill it once per day, it would last anywhere from about 9 months to 3 years. The blouse storage device? Try 2.7

billion years. That's over half of the estimated age of this beautiful rock we call Earth. But there's a catch. While the raw cost of this drive is just $30, hardly deserving of the crown we bestowed upon it, it has a total capacity

of just 8 kilobytes. To put that in perspective, if you wanted to store one single frame of this video you're watching right now, you would need three of these for a total of $90. And if you wanted to replace the 2TB SSD in your

gaming PC, it would cost over $7 billion. Excuse me, is this some sort of scam? Who needs this on a USB? How does this thing even work? Well, I don't know, but I'm going to get some answers right now. Where is she? Hey, where's our

sponsor Lexar. Their professional workflow docks are built to accelerate your post-production process with 40 gigabit per second transfer speeds thanks to Thunderbolt 4. Check out their workflow series of products using our link down below. Listen here, kid. You call yourself ferroelectric, but there ain't a

lick of iron in you. How do you explain that? Whoa, whoa, whoa! You don't have to answer that. The word ferroelectric indicates the behavior of a material rather than the presence of iron in it. Let me put it in terms a donut eater

like you can understand. Magnetic materials have domains that contain dipoles. Usually these are randomly oriented, but if you organize the domains so their dipoles are aligned, well, you've got yourself a magnet. The same idea works for ferroelectrics, but in place

of an influencing magnetic field, it's influenced by an electric current. This ability to manipulate the state of domains allows us to store data. Store data? I don't think so. He just said he was RAM. People like that, they're too volatile to store data. Are you profiling

my client right now? I'm just saying, if you Google "flash memory versus RAM," pretty much every result is going to tell you flash memory is non-volatile, meaning it can store data even when it's unpowered, and random access memory is volatile. That's a false dichotomy, and

you know it. Let's talk about why it's called RAM. Originally it was to differentiate from sequential access memory, where you can only read things in a specific order. Think like a VHS movie or a cassette tape: you've got to fast forward or rewind to get the stuff you

Want that's essentially how all forms of long-term storage work, but with varying speeds and techniques. By contrast, RAM allows any individual bit of information to be accessed directly. The volatility of RAM is not an inherent characteristic, but a side effect of the modern technologies we use to make it.

Sorry, can we just drop this bit? It's been going kind of long. You could call it a kilobit. Get out! But just because he's gone doesn't mean we're done talking about ferroelectric RAM and what makes it so special. FeRAM uses microscopic crystals

that contain an atom floating within their structure. By applying an electric current, we can move the atom's position within the crystal. This represents a bit, one or zero. The reason it is so durable is because, unlike NAND flash, which uses electrons to store bits – electrons that

are desperate to find their way back to equilibrium – the crystal contains the entire atom. And for practical purposes, that atom is entirely at rest in either position. So FeRAM is about as non-volatile as it gets, not only not requiring power for data retention, but also retaining

that data unpowered for hundreds of years when stored correctly. Now, there are some additional gotchas. To write a single bit, the entire storage device needs to be completely overwritten, for instance. But luckily, as long as your microcontroller can handle the throughput, it can do that virtually

instantaneously, making FeRAM great for scenarios where the power could be cut at any moment. Think like data logging for an aircraft or a military vehicle, which is all super interesting. But, uh, what's the deal with this FeRAM USB stick? Let me show you how it works. It's

got out-of-the-box support for Unix-based systems, but if you're on Windows, you're going to need to do a quick teardown to flash the firmware. Luckily, I've got all the tools I need in my cargo pants from LTTstore.com. While we're in here, by the way, why don't

we take a look at the guts. It's got a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, a 4-Mbyte NOR flash chip to store firmware, and our FeRAM chip. Once we flash the firmware, we can access it like this. It has an on-device text editor where you can jot

down anything you like, as long as it fits in 8,000 bytes, which, by default, is, yep, about 8,000 characters. So what would you use it for? Well, most likely long-term storage of critical information, like, say, a really important phone number that you really don't want

to forget, or, more likely, crypto keys or passwords. Uh, another option would be to make a time capsule that could be read long into the future. It only stores text out of the box, but theoretically, you could use a hex editor to store whatever kind of data you want on this thing. The

only question then is, okay, we've got this technology that has the fast reads and writes of DRAM, is non-volatile, has practically limitless endurance, and is immune to electromagnetic disruption. Oh, and I didn't even mention it uses a fraction of the power. Why aren't we

using it for everything? It comes down to density. A single sheet of paper can fit about 10,000 characters at 12-point font size. That represents the density of a high-capacity SSD. For comparison, FeRAM is about 250,000 times less dense. That means that

The size of one of the characters on this page would cover more than 18 city blocks in Chicago, and my memo would be about three times the size of New York City. So, realistically, you're probably better off making a quarter million copies and hoping at least one survives. But...

hold on. You might be thinking flash memory came from similarly humble beginnings, with early chips also being limited to just kilobytes of storage. How do we know that FeRAM isn't the future? Well, it's the crystals. The crystals in current ferroelectric RAM can't hold their

states if they get too small, meaning that they will no longer be able to store any data at all. Now, there is active research into various non-volatile RAM, including new ferroelectric materials that could scale smaller. But the question is, why would companies bother investing in this tech?

Our large-scale computer systems are currently well served by traditional forms of RAM and storage, even if longevity is a problem that everyone's just kind of ignoring for the time being. Or, well, not everyone. There are multiple long-term storage solutions that come in much larger capacities, like

Ultrium tape and M-Disc. But both of those require initial investments in hardware in order to read and write them, and they operate on the assumption that that hardware will still exist when the time comes to read them. Now, you could argue that the blouse dual storage device has

the same problem, given that the onboard flash memory and the microcontroller are both likely to die long before the FeRAM will. But here's the cool thing: You actually don't need either of those things to access the data that's stored on the FeRAM should any other components

become obsolete or non-functional, you can interact directly with the FRAM using an SOP8 test clip. Whether it's the year 2050 or 1950, which I only bring up as a possibility because the folks at Microchip, who manufactured the blow storage

device, also brought it up. The bottom line is: this tech is pretty cool, and if you've made it this far into a dense, nerdy video, you are too. So, to reward you, and also to prove just how durable this thing is, we're going to

place it in a geocache somewhere in the Vancouver, BC area with $500 of LTT store coupon codes on it. We've hidden clues to its location within this video, so just, uh, happy hunting! And make sure to post on the forum if you find it. The first clue can

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The Most Expensive USB Drive on Earth

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
