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Author Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O  (Read 12998197 times)

methylatedspirit

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155445 on: January 27, 2021, 08:28:34 am »

Just not as bad as the "Garbage", "Bargain Bin" flash found inside an sdcard, that is intended to live inside a digital camera.

Is there some kind of binning going on? Do they just make one big flash chip, but parts of it will be rendered unusable because of manufacturing variation, so they just say "fuck it" and they just laser off the bad parts? Do they then just sell off the prime-quality ones as SSD flash, the medium quality ones as eMMC flash, and the garbage ones as SD card flash? That explains why SD cards are so inexpensive compared to SSDs. They're the Celerons and Athlons of the flash world.
« Last Edit: January 27, 2021, 08:35:29 am by methylatedspirit »
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methylatedspirit

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155446 on: January 27, 2021, 08:46:05 am »

Okay, Catto's (my cat) acting weird. She's forcing herself into my room, even when I pick her up and put her outside. Should I be concerned? She's pregnant, so is this a sign of something?
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wierd

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155447 on: January 27, 2021, 09:01:50 am »

Kitty may be getting overwhelmed by pregnancy hormones, and be seeking connection/social grooming/status reinforcement, as well as seeking a safe and comfortable place to have and raise kittens.

Rather than be worried about kitty, it is high praise that your company is where kitty thinks those things are highest in abundance.
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wierd

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155448 on: January 27, 2021, 09:18:51 am »

Just not as bad as the "Garbage", "Bargain Bin" flash found inside an sdcard, that is intended to live inside a digital camera.

Is there some kind of binning going on? Do they just make one big flash chip, but parts of it will be rendered unusable because of manufacturing variation, so they just say "fuck it" and they just laser off the bad parts? Do they then just sell off the prime-quality ones as SSD flash, the medium quality ones as eMMC flash, and the garbage ones as SD card flash? That explains why SD cards are so inexpensive compared to SSDs. They're the Celerons and Athlons of the flash world.

In actuality, a little of several things.

1), flash is a commodity item. The actual MLC flash cells produced may be produced at a density that is not really useful for high-reliability applications (data center, computers), but are highly salable for disposable, unreliable media devices (cameras, phones).   So, they are out of the gate designed differently. (very large MLC stacks on the silicon itself.) Add to that, the selection of the flash controller paired with that flash array.  These are very carefully selected for in high-reliability settings, where features like "large internal RAM" to buffer reads and writes to abstract away some of the problems of using MLC memory technologies is very useful and desirable in the end product. That same high internal capability spec sheet, is how the controller can be intelligent about what cells to write to to minimize total damage to the sum total of its arrays over time (prevent hotspots), etc.  Those features become onerously costly from a price perspective, on "disposable" media, like an SD card. As such, the controller in an SDCard is "Bottom rung, low featureset, cheapest possible, garbage of the week-- whatever is literally the least expensive to source and slap on this production run."

2) Of that, some modules come out better than others. There *IS* some binning, in both demographics of design and implementation.  For instance, I would expect the flash modules on an eMMC to be bargain bin modules initially intended to be used on an actual SSD, but which do not meet certain QA benchmarks or requirements.  They get a middling controller stuck on them, and they are slapped inside a single chip eMMC package, and soldered to a chromebook.  This is why they tend to be of a low capacity size. Internally, they might be a much more spacious MLC array, but there could be defects in the array. The flash controller abstracts that away, and just presents the dodgy module as smaller capcity, and the midrange controller inside is able to do some tricks to hide the defect.

Due to this, an eMMC solution tends to have smaller erase block, and larger page sizes, then your typical SDCard.  The physical design of the chip has fewer cells per level, (because the module was intended to go in an actual SSD), which improves the write health of the device, because the fewer cells in the logical level, the less prone to failure it is.  The erase block size is a direct reflection of how many cells are physically pipelined in the chip's internal design.

SDCard is "Garbage Tier", because it has:

HUGE erase block size
TEEEENY TINY page size
Flash memory with a relatively low durability
Garbage tier flash controller

This discussion is a bit like classifying cars.  A proper SSD has sportscar parts-- where an SDcard is a damned Yugo. Or a VW Beetle.



To really drive this home--

The erase block size of the eMMC in that chromebook is something like 64kb, with a page size of 8kb. The module's total size is 16gb.

The erase block size of the class 10+ SDCard I am using, has an erase block size of 4 MEGABYTES, with a 32kb page size.  The module's size is 256gb.


There is an 8:1 ratio between the erase block size, and page size, on the eMMC, and a 128:1 ratio on the SDCard.
The flash module density, in terms of how many cells in the MLC gate arrays, is 8 times more cells per logical unit, in the SDcard than in the eMMC's module.

Apples and Oranges.


I know from your prior post history that you are good with math.  It should be trivially easy for you to plug in some simple numbers for a typical write operation, and realize just how much more harmful write amplification will be in an SDCard, than in the eMMC.

Consider, the "default" allocation unit size for NTFS is 512 BYTES. This is the historical size for a single sector on a mechanical HDD.  The default allocation unit size for EXT4 is 4kb.

In the eMMC module, this is a "worst case" outcome of, "128:1" amplification with NTFS on the eMMC and "8192:1" amplification for the SDCard.  For EXT4, the worst-case amplification is 16:1 for the eMMC module, and 1024:1 for the SDCard.

(Eg, if you incrementally write at the default allocation unit sizes, the controller inside the flash module would have to blank and re-write the erase block the first number of times, before you logically get to the next block.)

If you look at your typical SDcard, as it comes from the factory, you will see that the cluster size for exFAT is some huge number. Usually something like 64kb, to 128kb. Perhaps higher.  This is the smallest granular unit written to the device.  This is how the SDCard Association deals with the abysmal write amplification figures for the disposable, garbage-tier flash configurations found on SDCards.  They just do not permit small writes to begin with.  However, since the flash drive emulates an old fashioned hard disk, with a logical sector size of 512 BYTES......   You can clearly see how choosing the wrong file system options when reformatting the device can SERIOUSLY jack them up, and do it FAST.

The chromebook's eMMC is implemented with Linux's EXT4 file system in mind, with the default 4kb allocation unit size in mind.  Note how the "worst case" is some very easily tolerable 16:1 ratio. With the right options with stride/stripe, that actually comes out to a perfect 1:1.  (the EXT4 FS driver queues and concatonates writes until blocks of data the exact size of the erase unit are achieved, then commits THOSE to the device. This assures that all write operations perfectly match the geometry underneath, regardless of the logical filesystem block size, which is still 4kb. This feature is ACTUALLY intended for RAID arrays, where you have "real" stripes of data being written across an array of disks.  If you have, say, 8 drives with 512 byte sectors, you have a stripe that is 4kb wide. You would want all write operations to be even multiples of that value, so that your array is maximally efficient. The FS driver does that concatonation, before disk committal, to achieve that. When we give the format operation data for stripe and stride, we are abusing that functionality to "massage" the data into a chunkiness appropriate for the media.)

As you can imagine, if you formatted that 256gb SDCard with NTFS, at the default 512 byte allocation unit size, it would not only wear out the device 8192 times faster, it would also degrade its write speed performance by that much as well. (because the card has to write, then re-write, then re-re-write-- over and over and over again, with each subsequent allocation unit you write to the disk.)

« Last Edit: January 27, 2021, 09:58:31 am by wierd »
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Rolan7

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155449 on: January 27, 2021, 10:39:10 pm »

[drunk snip]
Edit: Excuse me.  I'm referring to how the short-sellers got bailed out.
Because there can never be consequences for playing the market.
Ever.
« Last Edit: January 28, 2021, 10:58:12 am by Rolan7 »
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dragdeler

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155450 on: January 27, 2021, 11:02:01 pm »

-
« Last Edit: September 16, 2023, 01:29:22 pm by dragdeler »
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King Zultan

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155451 on: January 28, 2021, 04:14:41 am »

I prefer my laptops have a DVD drive.

Also what is so great about a SSD.
I love that these "angels" can die in the fiduciary fire.

Fire, fire.  All the fire~

Excuse me.  I am supposed to be polite..
I am not supposed to dunk on your fucking losses <3
oh wait the government bailed you out.

Edit: Excuse me.  I'm referring to how the short-sellers got bailed out.
Because there can never be consequences for pplaying the market.
Ever.
I'm gonna guess I'm not who you meant to quote, if you did mean to quote me I have no idea what your talking about.
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methylatedspirit

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155452 on: January 28, 2021, 04:18:30 am »

"short-sellers", "bailed out", "market"... definitely trying to hit the Laugh Thread, but missed and landed at the WTF thread. It is a pretty good WTF without that context, so... "task failed successfully"?
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methylatedspirit

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155453 on: January 28, 2021, 04:24:09 am »

OH GOD CATTO HAS GIVEN BIRTH. I'm not ready to be a parent yet! And her... presumably ammiotic fluid spilled everywhere. Gross, but it's not piss.
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King Zultan

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155454 on: January 28, 2021, 04:27:45 am »

I wouldn't do anything about that stuff until she's finished having and cleaning the babies.
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wierd

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155455 on: January 28, 2021, 04:45:28 am »

OH GOD CATTO HAS GIVEN BIRTH. I'm not ready to be a parent yet! And her... presumably ammiotic fluid spilled everywhere. Gross, but it's not piss.


I told you catto was looking for a place to have the babies.  (eye roll)

It's still high praise that she thinks "Where YOU are" is the best place. Normally, momma cat finds the most isolated, sheltered, and hard to get to spot she can find for that.
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methylatedspirit

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155456 on: January 28, 2021, 05:03:49 am »

Huh. I dunno, the idea that I have to be responsible for anyone's wellbeing, or responsible at all... I don't like that. I don't like being responsible, and I think the shock of that is sorta killing my brain a little. It's not like I can just run away from this. I think fear might be overtaking me, because I'm sure as hell not thinking straight.
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KittyTac

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155457 on: January 28, 2021, 05:32:11 am »

Take a deep breath and look up "how to take care of kittens" or something. Or give them away to a shelter.
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hops

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155458 on: January 28, 2021, 05:44:05 am »

I think one is generally expected to nurse the kitties to a month old before they can give them away.

And if this is the cat's first litter you may be in a bit of a rough ride.
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King Zultan

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #155459 on: January 28, 2021, 05:55:03 am »

I've always been told that the kittens have to stay with the mom at least six weeks before they can safely be separated.
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