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Why does flashdrive storage increment the way they do?

Zephyrr

Jun 12, 2014
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Jun 12, 2014
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Didnt know how to word this, but theres flashdrives that are 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256, etc. Why do they always double what the last one was? eg: 32x2=64
 

(*steve*)

¡sǝpodᴉʇuɐ ǝɥʇ ɹɐǝɥd
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Jan 21, 2010
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Powers of two... add an extra address line and that's what you get.

For a whole lot of reasons, a full address space makes life easier. For the chip makers it's pretty much essential otherwise you couldn't make a bank of arbitrary size without holes in it.

And the flash drive market pretty much follows the chips. This doesn't happen with spinning metal.

You *could* create a 3GB flash drive from three 1GB chips, but you wouldn't do it if 2GB chips were available because generally speaking a 2GB chip will cost less than two 1GB chips. So economic forces tend to take you along the line of flash storage being a power of two multiple of the chip size, and consequently a power of two.
 
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