TomTom satnavs selling for 50¢ each (designed obsolescence)

I saw a street market vendor with a pile of ~20 or so old TomToms. The price: 50¢ each, must buy in multiples of 2.

I would have loved to be able to flash them with some OSM-based app, but it does not exist AFAIK. It’s half-tempting to buy some if I see that vendor return because it could be fun to have some of the world’s smallest spinning patter hard drives. Indeed, if you open up an old #TomTom there are CompactFlash sized hard drives with tiny spinning platters which use a CF card interface. Probably of no practical use.

IMO, in a forward-thinking world TomTom would be forced to finance porting OSM to those obsolete devices. TomTom’s excuse for obsolescence is that their maps have outgrown the storage media capacity.

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RobotToaster, 5 months ago

I have a few of those microdrives i picked up a few years ago to use with raspberry pis. The idea was to prevent SD card wear by setting it to read only, and by using the mirodrives for log files and such.

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activistPnk, 5 months ago

~10 years ago hybrid SSDs were a thing. The idea was that one could simultaneously benefit from the high capacity of magnetic media and the speed of solid state chips.

I wonder if it might be useful in the world of small things to have a filesystem that’s smart about this. If a file is rarely overwritten, it could be moved to the SD while new files and frequently overwritten ones could be directed to the microdrive. And important data could be on a separate volume that mirrors a partition on both the SD and microdrive.

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czardestructo, 5 months ago

You can use log2ram to keep the log files in ram and only writing to the sdcard infrequently.

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