mp3/mp4 question


I'm not sure if I should post this here but I have a question about mp4 players.
I'm not really good with technical stuff and I have been checking mp4 players (I think I'll buy one) but some say the memory they have is harddisc and others say their memory is Flash . I don't really know what the difference is and how this would influence the way the players work.
An easy explanation would be nice.

What did the barmaid say? "Oh,yes. Oh,yes.Oh gods,yes." About Mort Kemnon,dumbass?.

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Hard drives are faster, more reliable under usual circumstances and cost less per GB. Flash takes less electricity to run and handles being dropped better.

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Thanks Ace.

What did the barmaid say? "Oh,yes. Oh,yes.Oh gods,yes." About Mort Kemnon,dumbass?.

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"Hard drives are faster, more reliable under usual circumstances"

That is exactly backward, a harddrive is magnetic platter, it's slower as an arm has to move to read an area and because it has moving parts it's slower. Flash memory is just a chip, no moving parts to bust, no parts must move to seek the address of a given song.

HD Bigger and cheaper usually.

FD More reliable and faster

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Comparison_of_SSD_with_hard_disk_drives

I should say Flash is only slower for writing. Basically, the writing process is more physically involved, so they wear out faster than hard drives and it takes longer.

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"I should say Flash is only slower for writing. Basically, the writing process is more physically involved, so they wear out faster than hard drives and it takes longer."

I agree, that is fair but their are no moving parts unlike a HD where the arm makes physical contact with the disk, it's a chip, there is nothing to really wear out (as far as the flash chip goes).

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Light bulbs don't have moving parts, either, but they still wear out. The state of the chemical that make up the data storage can only be stably changed so many times.

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About 300-500 times.

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A light bulb filament is creates light through intense heat, they burn up, flash memory does not need to glow red hot, in fact there is very little heat. It's a known fact that the industry is moving away from mechanical Hard Drives to flash memory and mechanical hard drives will someday be a thing of the past due to their much higher failure rate.

Ever wonder why USB sticks replaced floppy drives, it was not due to capacity at the time.

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USB sticks actually did replace floppies due to capacity issues. Floppies were so small as to be useless and no new standard had appeared to replace them. Zip and such never really caught on. USB didn't require any standard as basically all computers had a USB port and a USB stick was cheaper than a whole external magnetic drive. Also, USB was a lot more reliable than floppies, but floppies aren't based on the same tech as hard drives. (Namely the read-head makes contact with the media.) The computer industry isn't really moving to solid state. It's fine for MP3 players, but not so much running an operating system as those get re-written more often. Early netbooks often used solid-state drives due to space issues, but this is no longer the case.

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