I once heard it suggested that using multiple smaller memory cards was a good way to decrease the chances of losing data. It's hard to argue with the logic that several memory cards are unlikely to fail all at once but reality is complicated and there could be reasons that this advice is either unimportant or maybe even harmful. How does this pan out in reality?  Is the rate of failure of major brand memory cards high enough for this to be a realistic concern?  Handling a larger number of small memory cards could increase the chances for human error. Am I likely to come out ahead with smaller memory cards?
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I don't think anyone can give a definitive answer, but what are the factors I should consider?  What are the pros and cons?    I'm thinking: What are the costs? the risks? How is usability affected? Anything else?    Can you give any concrete examples or experiences you have had which incline you one way or the other?    Any thoughts gratefully received.
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My specific question is with the ASUS M3N78-VM motherboard that my home server uses. I currently have 4x2GB installed for a total of 8GB but I was hoping to upgrade to say 16GB (4x4GB). The official specifications of that motherboard says it only supports up to 8GB but it was released back when only 2GB sticks were available. What, if any, would prevent it from working with 4GB sticks now that 4GB sticks are available?  My general question is with motherboards in general... what would prevent a motherboard from working with bigger sticks if its all just the same type (DDR2 for example and same speeds) of memory?
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Are SSDs comparable to HDDs for reliability and is there published research on this?  Also are all SSD manufacturers at a similar 'reliability level'?
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I'm looking for succinct yet correct guidelines for evaluating a DDR3 memory PCB layout.  I know that trace length matching, via style and back-drilling, and signal grouping all matter.  I know that each group of 8 data bits plus two associated control lines need to be length matched.  I'm seeking a good summary of all the issues, or people's experience, especially if it covers both multi-chip modules and single point to point (one CPU and one memory chip) layout.  How critical is all this stuff for small single board CPU's?  I have read  and
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While doing some photography reading, i came across some support for archiving photos, videos on SD Cards. The process looked like:   Fill up SD Card with DSLR Share/publish any choice items via the PC Physically archive the SD Card   I would contrast this with my own method:   Fill up SD Card with DSLR Move contents to PC's HDD to free up SD Card Archive data via traditional PC backup/archive mechanisms   While this makes good sense from a digital photography point of view, I wasn't sure how well it fit for standard PC archival. (This is why i post here instead of the photography stackexchange) Can anyone speak to the negatives of generic PC-based backup/archival via SD card?   Is there anything that would limit my ability to retrieve data later? Are there any environmental concerns (moisture, heat, sunlight, etc.) that could cause things to break down?   Edit 1 - in doing some more research, i see that SanDisk has a  product that is 100 year archival with (W)rite (O)nce (R)ead (M)any funtionality. What I didn't get was if that was available for purchase or the cost per GB.  Edit 2 - SD-WORM requires special readers/writers, and wouldn't be suitable.
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Our ability to store data on or in physical media continues to grow, with the maximum amount a data you can store in a given volume increasing exponentially from year to year. Storage devices continue to get smaller and their capacity gets bigger.   This can't continue forever, though, I would imagine. "Things" can only get so small; but what about information? How small can a single bit of information be?  Put another way: given a limited physical space -- say 1 cubic centimeter -- and without assuming more dimensions than we currently have access to, what is the maximum amount of information that can be stored in that space? At what point does the exponential growth of storage density come to such a conclusive and final halt that we have no reason to even attempt to increase it further?
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I'm building a Core  system which supports dual-channel memory (up to 16&nbsp;GB in four DIMMs), my target is 8&nbsp;GB. From the performance perspective, is it better to have two times 4&nbsp;GB or four times 2&nbsp;GB?
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I have a Canon 20D and was looking to buy a memory card. Turns out there are lots of options that vary in price. This got me wondering, what should I be looking out for when buying a memory card.  Based on some research that I've done, I have some points:   What is the maximum memory size your camera supports ?   From what I can tell, the 20D supports up to 8GB (could not find it in the manual), so anything over that would be a waste. Although I did find some posts where users claim they can use a larger card, as long as they dont format it using the camera. Can anyone speak to that? Personally I might just stick with the limit set by the camera.  Read/Write Speed?   I am still trying to figure this one out. I saw . Essentially the write speed of the card should be higher than that of the camera, which makes sense. However how do I figure out the write speed of my camera? Does anyone know what the write speed of a Canon 20d is?  What brand to buy?   I currently have a SanDisk Extreme 512MB card. That is why I started looking for the same card with a higher capacity. A Kingston or Transcend is approx. $15 while a SanDisk is over $30...  Extreme temperatures?    Not sure how important this is, but I do live where the temperature can go pretty low below 0F. That doesn't mean I will necessarily be doing photography outside in that temperature. What kind of problems do people run in to with low temp?    Are there any other things that I should be looking at?
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I have customer data from 2 brands. The data structure are the same, but I expected the customer behaviour to be different in different brand.  So I could train 2 models, 1 for each brand, or I could train one model on both brands, but flag which brand the customers belongs to within the data.  So my question is, would training on both brands with flags be too much more work for the Machine Learning (I'm using neural network), and therefore be harder to achieve good accuracy than to have dedicated models for each brand?
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I have a Motorola phone, with 8GB of internal memory.  To my surprise, in a few days, I had 474MB of free space, but couldn't install a 338KB app!! So, clearly the limit of ~25MB referred to in some comments ( and ) are not always the case. A user just told me the following:     Actually it's "25MB or 10% of the storage", whichever is hit first. So   with e.g. 10 GB internal storage, it would hit you as soon as you drop   below 1 GB free. Crazy, but that's what it is.   Actually, that's not correct, because I didn't have to free up 1GB of internal memory. But anyway, half a gigabyte is enough to run a full operational system. I've seen similar complaints of hundreds of MB not enough to install apps ~ 1MB or similar small operations ( and ).  What's wrong here?
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I'm dating a professional photographer that has been accumulating digital images at an alarming rate (thousands of high-res images per month).  Does anyone have any recommendations of external and/or remote storage solutions to effectively work with such large volumes of data?  Managing burned DVDs seems a little scary.
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I have, not one but two microSD cards that my phone (Samsung Galaxy Young, Gingerbread OS) seem to have broken. One is 1GB and the other is 2GB. The 1GB one won't be formatted.  When I put the 1GB one into the computer the computer prompts for a formatting. I don't care for the content so I tried to format it, but to no avail; the format fails and I have no idea what to do to make it work again.  I tried using the SDformatter software, but it can't format the card as it is write protected. I'm googling to solve it but so far no success.  My computer OS is win7 if that's of any relevance.
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I want a complete guide to make a generic multiboot USB. Requests:  Multiple iso boots; Multiple persistent boots (unlimited size); One partition to data storage;  What I've tried:  only lets 1 persistent ISO.  limits your persistent storage to 4GB, no partition for data (still good) mkusb More than 4GB persistent storage, data partition, but single boot. Correct me if I'm wrong. What can be done so far is accepted.
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Cameras rarely specify exactly what speed cards you should be using in them - I just checked the manual for my DSLR, and all it says is to use an SDHD card, and a "high speed" card should be used for recording video.  On the other hand, there are a number of different rating systems for memory card speed (33x! 150x! Class 2! Class 10!) and price seems to increase with speed.  Is there any way to test the maximum write speed the camera is capable of?  Are the read/write speeds documented anywhere?
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Possible Duplicate:          I have been working on computers for quite some time now and realize the importance of virtual memory.  I have been assuming that setting this to twice the amount of RAM installed is what is necessary.  However, as memory has been growing over the years, I am wondering if this is still true.  For example, on my 6 GB RAM system is it best practice to set the virtual memory size to 12 GB? For smaller ram systems, is it worthwhile in performance to set the virtual ram to something even more (i.e. 1GB physical ram and 3GB virtual)?
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If you have a private data on a recent, normal hard drive - how many passes do you need to delete the data to make it unrecoverable?  Not in the sense, that a forensic team of 20 experts with a budget of 100 million euro or dollars and 10 years of time to restore a couple of bytes from a known address with 80% accuracy, but few people with a few 1000 €/$ budget, who wouldn't spend more than two weeks on the job, and who don't know where on the drive they are searching.   Linux/GNU shred says in the manual:     -n, --iterations=N           overwrite N times instead of the default (3)   but on the one hand I heard about an NSA suggestion to overwrite 27 times, and on the other hand professional data recovery firms could not recover data from a drive that was wiped just once.   Evidence, papers, proof?  Note: What this question is not:    It's not about bad sectors, where data might slip through It's not about old MFM/RLL-drives from the early 90ies  It's not about different tools It's not so much about the method (random numbers 0s, 0xFF and fancy patterns).  It's not about different techniques to wipe it securely (magnetic power, melting, filling with sand and turning).  It's not about special problems of flash drives
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Recently a company called  demonstrated a product of cloud storage. they indicated that they would use "Convergent Encryption" to secure your data and de-duplicate, essentially one copy of the same file between users.  From what I can read on a  about Secure Data Duplication which makes mention of "" and assuming this is what this is referring too.  My question is, what security implications of using this technology and is it truly secure that you cannot get the key based on chunk data being used to generate different keys between users.  Reference interview on