A USB stick that will hold your precious data for 200 years, what's the catch? Er... it only holds 8kB

HardwareStorageA USB stick that will hold your precious data for 200 years, what’s the catch? Er… it only holds 8kBWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

(Image credit: Machdyne)

Machdyne Blaustahl USB 8kB FRAM storage device

Yes, you read that right. Not 8GB, not 8MB—we’re talking 8kB of information. That’s a handful of pages in a standard text file, at the very most. That might seem an unusably small capacity but there’s a very good reason for it being so tiny. Instead of using industry-standard NAND flash for storage, German makers Machdyne opted to go with a single ferromagnetic RAM chip (viaTom’s Hardware).

Ferromagnetic RAM (FRAM or FeRAM for short) works a little bit like ordinary RAM does, except that it doesn’t have billions of tiny dielectric capacitors inside for storing data in the form of charge. Instead, FRAM uses ferroelectric capacitors which have a major advantage in that they don’t need to be periodically refreshed to retain their charge. Kept in ideal conditions, the data won’t leak away for well over a century.

That’s considerably longer than anyconsumer-grade SSDyou can buy, where you’ll be lucky to get more than 10 years of safe data retention, even if you just use it once and keep it tucked away safely.

FRAM also works as fast as NAND flash does, though not as speedy as thelatest DRAM kitsdo, and also has a really good write endurance limit. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? The downside to FRAM is that very few companies make it and it’s considerably more expensive to produce, compared to flash and DRAM.

However, 8kB is enough to hold a password or other vital snippets of data, so its longevity could make it useful for retaining login details for your critical accounts. At the moment, the device doesn’t offer any encryption but Machdyne states that it’s planning on implementing support for it in the future, via an open-source firmware update.

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Tucked away in the device’s tiny circuit board is aRaspberry Pi RP2040microcontroller to manage the storage and USB Type-A interface, and 4MB of NOR flash memory to store a built-in text editor. The FRAM can be write-protected via a spot of soldering and should the RP2040 fail or USB ports utterly disappear in the distant future, the ferromagnetic RAM chip can be read directly from its contacts.

Now, all I need is for someone to invent something that will help me locate the countless USB flash drives I’ve misplaced over the years. One of those and a few Blaustahls and I’ll be set for life. Mine and the drive’s.

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