Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I don't know about physical size, but there's something I've always
> wondered about:
>
> Let me pick an example at random. When USB flash drives first came out,
> 64MB was about the biggest drive you would possibly buy. Today you can
> easily pick up a 4GB drive that costs less than the price of having it
> physically delivered to your house.
>
> So... why didn't they just make the 4GB drives to start with? Why did
> they have to start by making 64MB drives, and then starting to make
> 128MB drives, and then moving on to 256MB drives, and so forth? Why
> couldn't they just go directly to 4GB? What enables them to make those
> today but prevented them from making them back then?
>

When they started making flash memory chips, the manufacturing technology was
not as advanced as it is now.

have much less memory cells.
Also the manufacturing yield was probably much less due to contamination in the
manufacturing process.
What that means is that the bigger the area of a single chip, the higher the
probability of contamination and the fault of the chip. This has a parabolic
relation. This meant that chip sizes were kept small to increase yield.
Nowadays processes have much better yield and much smaller structure sizes which
means you can have a higher storage density.

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Why do you have to design, test, manufacture and sell a 64MB drive
> before you can attempt to make a 128MB one? How does the former help you
> do the latter? Why can't you just jump straight to 4GB? (Or perhaps even
> more than that?)

If I'm correct you do work in a research facility. So even you're not a
researcher you should know how research works.
That's exactly what happens with chip technology.
You start researching, get a workable product with low performance. To finace
further research, you start selling it, knowing that you can do better.
Performance keeps improving, prices drop and so on.

Just compare the chip size of an old simm memory card to a DDR3 memory module.
The chip case will be about the same, but the contained memory is magnitudes
lager.

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