this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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TomTom satnavs selling for 50¢ each (designed obsolescence) (self.zerowaste)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by activistPnk to c/zerowaste
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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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[–] activistPnk 2 points 1 year 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.