After spending a few frustrating hours on computer inventory at my office, I came up with the following question:
Why in the world don’t hard drive and memory chip manufacturers label their products with the amount of storage they contain?
Hmmm… some manufacturers are kind of cryptic but most (not all) modern multi-gig drives do include some mention of the capacity somewhere on the label. If not most manufacturers have web sites to let you cross reference the drive to a description.
Memory is another story entirely. Memory modules are assembled by God knows how many large and small manufacturers and beyond their own inventory ID labeling many smaller manufacturers leave the rest to your own detective skills. Many largers manufacturers do label memory with not only the chip geometry but with the meg capacity and other end user friendly info as well.
In some larger shops the IS dept has bought a memory chip tester (not cheap!) to ID and test questionable chips. If you’re dealing with a large enough quantity it can pay for itself in no time.
Most hard drives nowadays do have labels with the capacity written on them. I remember with some older hard drives, the manufacturers would sometimes use one label for a series of drives, each drive having a different capacity. These labels obviously could not have the drive size printed on them.
The reason the majority of memory chips are not labelled with the total memory size is that the completed chips you buy are constructed in two steps (okay, they’re constructed in many, many, steps, but two basic groupings of steps). First, the actually memory chips are made (the black chips on the memory stick). These black chips are then marked by the manufacturer (Hyundai, Siemens, Micron, Toshiba, what have you). The markings usually contain information regarding capacity, memory timings, and the like, and are typically a somewhat cryptic string on numbers and letters (at least, it appears that way unless you understand the marking scheme, which I don’t).
These chips are then sent to various manufacturers to be mounted on printed circuit boards. These boards are typically green with aluminum printed circuits and tin or gold edge contacts. The completed memory module is then tested, pacakged, and sold. Thus, the only way the memory module capacity can be labelled is if the manufacturers in this second step decide to print the labels on the module. It’s just an extra step, though, so they sometimes don’t bother. After all, they know the capacity of the memory module (read off the markings on one of the memory chips and multiply by the number of chips), and they can easily convey to the consumer the capacity of the total module by printing it on the packaging.
I don’t know that the markings themselves actually contain the information - there may be some consistency within a particular manufacturer regarding what part of the number refers to what parameter of the memory, but in general, you need a lookup table to determine the parameters of a particular chip. Micron is one of the few manufacturers that provides this information on their site for older chips in addition to current ones.
FWIW, I can’t think of any good reason for the actual DIMM manufacturer not to put the memory capacity on the stick after it’s put together.