GoKawiil
Tech News
Flash drives face multiple risks including physical loss, a finite number of write cycles before failure, and 'bit rot,' where stored electrical charges degrade over time and corrupt data. Unlike SSDs, thumb drives can't use TRIM commands to recover worn storage space, and their connectors or controller chips can fail due to impacts, corrosion, or humidity.
A developer has published an open-source DNS ad-blocking project that runs on the ESP32-C3, a roughly $2 microcontroller, without requiring PSRAM. Instead of storing blocklist domains as strings in RAM, the system stores them as sorted 40-bit hashes in flash memory, allowing over 140,000 domains to fit in about 0.7MB of flash and be matched via binary search in roughly 10 milliseconds using only about 50KB of RAM.
External SSDs use flash storage that speeds up file transfers and editing directly from the drive, while offering greater durability, quieter operation, and lower power draw thanks to having no moving parts. External hard drives remain the cheaper option per gigabyte, with examples like a 2TB Seagate HDD costing less than a 1TB Samsung T9 SSD.