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How large files are stored in a small memory chip?

I have a curiosity to know.. how does a small memory card holds up so many thing ... Crores lines of code, images, music and many other things? For example: A code of 500 lines looks so big on paper but the same gets stored in such a small memory chip and crores of lines are stored. How? I hope you understand my question.

1st Nov 2019, 12:58 PM
Chetali Shah
Chetali Shah - avatar
29 Answers
+ 12
I don't know if you know but the chips of size of our nail can contain millions of transistors. This study is called VLSI - Very large scale integration.
1st Nov 2019, 1:31 PM
Avinesh
Avinesh - avatar
+ 8
With the default page size of 1024 bytes, an SQLite database is limited in size to 2 terabytes (241bytes). And even if it could handle larger databases, SQLite stores the entire database in a single disk file and many filesystems limit the maximum size of files to something less than this. So if you are contemplating databases of this magnitude, you would do well to consider using a client/server database engine that spreads its content across multiple disk files, and perhaps across multiple volumes. I gotit from stack overflow. https://practice.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/how-are-big-files-stored-in-memory
3rd Nov 2019, 10:05 AM
Isaac Duah [Active!]
Isaac Duah [Active!] - avatar
+ 7
Although physically small, the memory chips can contain a large amount of memory.
3rd Nov 2019, 4:05 AM
Sonic
Sonic - avatar
+ 5
PS: I know binary language is used. Now for example, 'A' = 01000001 in binary. It becomes more and more big as every letter, number, character gets converted into binary. I hope you people understand my question. Also correct me if I am wrong.
1st Nov 2019, 1:05 PM
Chetali Shah
Chetali Shah - avatar
+ 5
Thank you Avinesh Anton Böhler the video was useful.
1st Nov 2019, 1:42 PM
Chetali Shah
Chetali Shah - avatar
+ 5
500 lines of code containing an average of 20 characters per line will consume approximately 10KB of memory. A small memory chip can contain half a million times that amount of memory due to recent advances in hardware.
3rd Nov 2019, 4:11 AM
Sonic
Sonic - avatar
+ 4
this might be interisting for you: https://youtu.be/ZWQ0591PAxM
1st Nov 2019, 1:30 PM
Anton Böhler
Anton Böhler - avatar
+ 3
compression, for example you can encode letters which occur more often with less bits and onces which occur less often with more. This should reduce the amount of bits used... (atleast i've heard of this, i think it's called huffman encoding or sth like that😅, but I'm not quite sure) but there are many way to compress data, with detail loss and not
1st Nov 2019, 1:18 PM
Anton Böhler
Anton Böhler - avatar
+ 3
See it is not that complicated because we are talking about storage in terms of Giga bytes at least. So the codes we generally type does not occupy much space and through initialization we can get an idea that how many bytes it occupied. In many cases it is just few kilobytes. And it is only during runtime that the compiler changes everything to machine language so that the system can understand the code. Just like writing code has become easy for us, similarly 1's and 0's are processed very easily by the system.
1st Nov 2019, 1:18 PM
Avinesh
Avinesh - avatar
+ 3
To be precise the chips are made up of transistors which generally work as switches "on" and "off" or you can say 0 or 1. So 8 switches make one byte which can store a character so these chips have megabytes or gigabytes of memory which means they can store millions of such characters. Since I studied electronics I can answer.
1st Nov 2019, 1:27 PM
Avinesh
Avinesh - avatar
+ 3
Thank you.
1st Nov 2019, 7:19 PM
Chetali Shah
Chetali Shah - avatar
+ 3
Basically it was a part of elecetronics it consists of millions of transistors apprx 5nm in size form series of complex circuits and the components called NAND chips it is non volatile & solid sate therefor no movable parts it stores charge in different pattern to store data
3rd Nov 2019, 10:37 AM
SR ​
SR ​ - avatar
+ 2
My question is not in terms of storage or compression. I dont know how to explain it😅. For example: earlier the monitors used to be so big with less functionality but now devices are small very small but functionality is much more. So how does so much of functionality and data and apps and everything is occupied in such a small sized memory card or if I say reduction of size with increase in functionality. How? Technology has changed and things are very advanced now. But what is happening in such a small device and how? I hope my question is clear now. Hotboytrue paper was an example to explain my question.
1st Nov 2019, 1:28 PM
Chetali Shah
Chetali Shah - avatar
+ 2
mabye this is what your looking for 🤷‍♂️😅 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNlUrzyH5r6jN9ulIgZBpdo
1st Nov 2019, 3:26 PM
Anton Böhler
Anton Böhler - avatar
+ 2
Memory cards have printed Circuit Boards(PCB). This PCBs have circuits, transistors etc. There are millions of them on the memory card. Those store the data you enter. NOW THE GREAT QUESTION WILL COME HOW THIS PCBs and also the millions of circuits ARE CREATED SMALL. before that....... 500 lines of code contain so much letters, signs, numbers. This are converted into machine code or 1,0. So now you need to know 1 is 1 byte 0 is too. Then we have to calculate the byte of 500 line of codes(suppose 500 line is 500k byte). If we now assume 1 circuit can hold 1 byte. Then 500k circuits have to be on that memory card.[[[[actually thats more complicated then that I just came up with something easier to hear and read]]]]. Ok until now we got every thing. So to store that 500line of code you needed a 1 stored building sized memory some decades ago but today only 1 finger sized memory. The main reason is those PCB. Those were so big on those days, but now those are small(the PCB). *****Now QUESTION how PCBs now small.
2nd Nov 2019, 8:46 PM
Walid Al Hasan
Walid Al Hasan - avatar
+ 2
Look up Moore's Law.
3rd Nov 2019, 4:09 AM
Sonic
Sonic - avatar
+ 2
The BIOS of your notebook generally is some chip named like 25Q64 (search it in google) that has 64Mbit (8MB) and it is smaller than your nail. A code writed in C with 600 lines has about 12KB and your compiled version has 22KB (it's not a rule, just a example). Thinking in this, 22KB is just 2% of chip and would be necessary 30000 lines of code to full the chip. This is just a exercise of thinking. There are chips that use VLSI technology (like RAMs) and has so much capacity and it is more smaller.
4th Nov 2019, 2:36 AM
José Ailton Batista da Silva
José Ailton Batista da Silva - avatar
+ 2
Okay, Thank you
4th Nov 2019, 4:57 AM
Chetali Shah
Chetali Shah - avatar
+ 2
Chetali Shah isn't it too much chips? Been quite a heavy discussion. 😂
4th Nov 2019, 5:00 AM
Avinesh
Avinesh - avatar