[Prompt]
custom: We talk in recent episodes about various ways that are employed to move data around the world, some  | Hosts: corn, herman

[Response]
Corn: Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about cold data transport, and he realized something most of us do without ever questioning it. You slide an old GPU into one of those silvery bags, zip it shut, and assume it's protected. But what if the bag itself is the problem? He's asking whether all anti-static bags are created equal, what sizes are useful to keep around, and whether everything in a tech enthusiast's inventory actually needs one. He's got an old GPU, some RAM sticks, a couple of single-board computers — and honestly, the answer for each of those is different.

Herman: Most people don't know that. They see the word anti-static on a pink bag and figure it's all the same stuff. It is not. And the difference can mean protection versus a very expensive paperweight.

Corn: Where do we start with this? Because I have a drawer full of these bags and I've never once asked what's actually happening inside them.

Herman: Let's start with what you can't feel. A human being can perceive a static discharge at about three thousand volts. You know that little zap when you touch a doorknob in winter? That's roughly three kilovolts. But the gate oxide layer in a modern MOSFET — the insulating barrier that keeps a transistor functioning — can be destroyed at just a hundred volts. That's thirty times lower than anything you'd ever feel.

Corn: You could handle a component, feel absolutely nothing, and still have fried it.

Herman: And it gets worse. In a seven-nanometer process node, which is what a lot of GPUs and modern processors use, that gate oxide layer is about zero point one microns thick. That's roughly one one-thousandth the width of a human hair. You're trying to protect something absurdly fragile with a bag most people grabbed from a pile and never thought about again.

Corn: Which brings us to the pink bag versus the silvery bag. I've always assumed the silvery one was just the deluxe version. Like the difference between regular garbage bags and the ones with the drawstring. But it's not that at all, is it?

Herman: It's not even close. They work on completely different principles. Let's start with the pink polyethylene bags, because those are the ones everyone has. They're what Amazon ships RAM sticks in, they're what motherboards often come wrapped in. The pink color isn't decorative — it comes from an antistatic agent, typically amines or quaternary ammonium salts, that's been mixed into the polyethylene during manufacturing.

Corn: That sounds like something that migrates.

Herman: That's exactly what it does. The antistatic agent blooms to the surface over time, where it attracts moisture from the air. That thin layer of moisture creates a slightly conductive surface. The bag doesn't block external charges — what it does is prevent the bag itself from generating a charge through triboelectric effects. You know, rubbing.

Corn: A pink bag is basically saying I promise not to shock your component myself. But if someone walks by in wool socks and reaches into the drawer, the bag is just standing there watching.

Herman: That's a perfect way to put it. A pink poly bag provides zero shielding against external electrostatic discharge events. It only prevents charge generation from the bag material rubbing against itself or the component. And here's the kicker — that antistatic agent loses effectiveness in low humidity. Below about twenty percent relative humidity, the surface conductivity drops significantly because there's less moisture for those amines to work with.

Corn: Which means a heated office in January is basically a worst-case scenario for pink bags.

Herman: And that's when most people are handling components — winter, dry air, synthetic sweaters, carpet everywhere. It's a triboelectric nightmare.

Corn: What about the silvery bags? The ones that look like someone turned a potato chip bag inside out?

Herman: Those are metallized shielding bags, and they work on a completely different principle. They're multilayer constructions. You've got an outer layer of polyester for durability, then a vapor-deposited layer of metal — usually aluminum or sometimes a nickel-copper combination — and then an inner layer of polyethylene that's been treated with an antistatic agent. That metal layer is the key. It creates a Faraday cage around whatever's inside.

Corn: A Faraday cage. So the charge hits the metal layer and just... circulates around the outside?

Herman: The charge distributes across the conductive surface and never reaches the interior. And because the inner layer is also static-dissipative, any charge that builds up inside the bag from the component moving around gets bled off to the metal layer and distributed. It's protection from both directions — internal charge generation and external discharge events.

Corn: It's the difference between wearing a raincoat and standing under an umbrella. The raincoat keeps you from getting wet from your own movement, but if someone dumps a bucket of water on your head, you're soaked. The umbrella blocks the bucket.

Herman: And the numbers back this up. Metallized shielding bags typically have a surface resistivity of ten to the fourth to ten to the sixth ohms per square. Pink poly bags are in the ten to the ninth to ten to the eleventh range. That's three to five orders of magnitude less conductive. The metallized bag is essentially a conductor wrapped around your component. The pink bag is barely more conductive than air.

Corn: When I put my old GPU in a pink bag, I'm basically giving it a gentle suggestion not to get zapped.

Herman: Hoping the universe agrees. There's a 2023 study from Intel — they analyzed field-returned GPUs and found that thirty percent of units with ESD damage showed evidence of improper bag use during transport or storage. That's not a fringe failure mode. That's a systemic problem.

Corn: These are GPUs being shipped back to Intel by people who presumably think they're doing the right thing.

Herman: They grabbed whatever anti-static bag they had, assumed it was fine, and it wasn't. And a GPU is exactly the kind of component where this matters most. You've got exposed printed circuit board, fine-pitch traces, ball grid array packages with hundreds of tiny solder balls, and a GPU core manufactured on a cutting-edge process node with an impossibly thin gate oxide. It's about as ESD-sensitive as consumer electronics get.

Corn: Which answers part of Daniel's question directly. The old GPU? Metallized shielding bag. Don't even think about pink poly for that.

Herman: Now, the RAM sticks are a different story. RAM modules have edge connectors and surface-mount components, but they're not as densely packed as a GPU, and the most sensitive parts — the DRAM chips themselves — are packaged. They're not bare silicon. For short-term storage, under six months, a pink poly bag is generally acceptable for RAM.

Corn: You said short-term. What changes after six months?

Herman: It's not that the RAM degrades in the bag. It's that the longer something sits in storage, the more handling events it's likely to experience. Someone moves the drawer, someone shuffles things around, the bag gets rubbed against other materials, the humidity cycles up and down with the seasons. Over time, the probability of an ESD event compounds. For cold storage — and this is where Daniel's cold data angle gets really interesting — you want metallized bags for everything, even components that are nominally fine in pink poly for short periods.

Corn: Because cold storage means you're not touching it for months or years, and when you finally do retrieve it, that retrieval moment is a single point of failure.

Herman: And for drives stored offline, ESD is actually a bigger risk than bit rot in the first five years. People worry about magnetic decay on hard drives, they worry about charge leakage in SSDs, but a single ESD event during retrieval can destroy the controller chip. The data on the NAND flash might be perfectly intact, but if the controller is fried, you're not getting to it without a clean room and a donor board.

Corn: That's a twelve-thousand-dollar mistake, based on a real case we know about. Small video production company, SSDs in pink bags inside a plastic bin.

Herman: The bin itself was the problem. Plastic bins are triboelectric generators. Every time you slide one across a shelf, every time something shifts inside, you're building up charge. The pink bags couldn't shield against the field that built up around the bin. If those SSDs had been in metallized bags, the Faraday cage would have protected them. The cost difference? Maybe forty dollars in bags versus twelve thousand dollars in lost drives and irreplaceable footage.

Corn: That's GPUs and SSDs. What about single-board computers? Daniel mentioned he's got a couple of those lying around.

Herman: Single-board computers — Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, anything with exposed GPIO headers and power traces — those absolutely need metallized shielding bags. And here's why: those GPIO pins are direct electrical pathways to the system-on-chip. There's no buffer, no protection circuit on most of those boards. A discharge that hits a GPIO pin goes straight to the processor. I've seen maker spaces lose multiple Raspberry Pi units during dry winter months because they were storing them in pink bags or, worse, just loose in a plastic organizer.

Corn: There's a real case study there. A maker space switched from pink to metallized bags after losing three Raspberry Pi units to ESD in a single winter. The bags cost them fifteen dollars. The replacement boards cost two hundred and ten.

Herman: That's just the hardware cost. It doesn't account for the downtime, the troubleshooting, the person who spends an afternoon trying to figure out why their project suddenly doesn't boot. ESD damage is insidious because it doesn't always cause immediate catastrophic failure. Sometimes it just degrades the gate oxide enough that the component fails six months later, and you never connect it back to the static shock you didn't even feel.

Corn: That's the really maddening part. Latent ESD damage. The component works fine for weeks or months, then one day it doesn't, and you're chasing a ghost.

Herman: That's why the industry is so serious about this. Semiconductor manufacturers don't mess around with ESD protection. Their assembly lines have humidity control, grounded floors, ionizers, wrist straps, heel straps, conductive everything. And then the component leaves the factory, gets put in a metallized shielding bag, and somewhere between the distributor and the end user, someone repackages it in a pink bag because that's what they had on hand.

Corn: Which brings us to the black bag confusion. I've seen these — completely black, slightly crinkly, look almost like a trash bag but stiffer. Are those the premium option?

Herman: Those are carbon-impregnated bags, and they're actually the most misunderstood option. They're conductive — not just static dissipative, but actually conductive. The carbon black mixed into the polyethylene creates a continuous conductive network through the material. And that's the problem. If you put a bare circuit board with exposed pins or contacts into a conductive bag, the bag can short those pins together.

Corn: The bag itself becomes a short circuit.

Herman: Carbon-impregnated bags are designed for shipping already-assembled boards that are in their enclosures, or for storing components where all the sensitive parts are packaged and there are no exposed leads. They're great for that use case because they're durable and the conductivity is consistent through the entire material — it doesn't depend on surface blooming like pink poly. But for bare PCBs or components with exposed pins, they're actually dangerous.

Corn: The hierarchy is: pink poly for low-sensitivity items in short-term storage, metallized shielding for anything sensitive or long-term, and black conductive only for assembled and enclosed products.

Herman: That's the practical summary, yes. And I want to emphasize — when I say pink poly is for low-sensitivity items, I mean things like cables, connectors, maybe a packaged CPU that's still in its plastic clamshell. Not bare boards. Not anything with exposed silicon.

Corn: Let's talk about the tear question, because I've definitely used bags with small holes in them and thought well, it's probably still mostly fine.

Herman: It depends on the bag type, and this is where the physics gets unforgiving. A tear in a metallized shielding bag breaks the continuity of the Faraday cage. Even a small tear — we're talking a few millimeters — creates a gap in the conductive layer. And electromagnetic fields don't need a large opening. If the tear is larger than about one-tenth of the wavelength of the discharge, the field can penetrate. For an ESD event, which has a very fast rise time and a broad frequency spectrum, even a pinhole can be a problem.

Corn: A torn metallized bag is compromised.

Herman: They're fifty cents to a dollar each. It's not worth the risk. For pink poly bags, a tear reduces the surface area of the antistatic layer, which means less protection against triboelectric charging, but it doesn't create the same kind of catastrophic shielding failure because there was no shielding to begin with. That said, a torn pink bag should also be replaced. The antistatic agent migrates to the surface, and if the surface is compromised, you've lost protection in that area.

Corn: The rule is: if it's torn, it's done. Regardless of type.

Herman: And I'd add: if it's visibly worn, if the metallized layer is starting to delaminate from the plastic, if the bag has been folded and creased repeatedly — replace it. These are consumable items. They're not designed to last forever.

Corn: Let's get practical about sizes. Daniel asked what's useful to keep around. I've got a drawer of random bags in random sizes, and I never have the right one.

Herman: Three sizes will cover almost everything a tech enthusiast or small business needs. Four by six inches is your small bag — that handles RAM sticks, M.2 SSDs, small adapter cards, Raspberry Pi boards, anything in that footprint. Six by ten inches is your medium bag — that's for GPUs, larger single-board computers, 2.5-inch SSDs, small network cards. Ten by fourteen inches is your large bag — motherboards, larger assemblies, multiple items you want to store together.

Corn: Four by six, six by ten, ten by fourteen. That's easy enough to remember.

Herman: You can buy mixed packs. A pack of fifty bags in assorted sizes, all metallized shielding, costs maybe twenty-five to thirty dollars. That's enough to store a substantial inventory. Label them by size and keep them in a drawer that's not subject to a lot of movement. And never — and I mean never — store components in direct contact with regular bubble wrap or packing foam.

Corn: Because regular bubble wrap is basically a static electricity factory.

Herman: It's polyethylene being rubbed against itself every time it shifts. The triboelectric series puts polyethylene fairly high on the list of materials that generate positive charge. Wrap a circuit board in regular bubble wrap, put it in a box, ship it across the country — by the time it arrives, that board has been sitting in a charged environment for days. If you need cushioning inside an anti-static bag, use anti-static foam or anti-static bubble wrap, which is pink and has the same kind of antistatic agent as the pink poly bags.

Corn: What about the bin itself? We mentioned the plastic bin problem earlier.

Herman: Plastic bins are insulators. They build up charge and they hold it. If you're storing metallized bags inside a plastic bin, the bags will protect their contents from direct discharge, but the bin itself can build up a substantial electric field. In a dry environment, that field can induce charges on conductive surfaces. The best practice is to use metal or conductive bins that are grounded, or to line plastic bins with anti-static foam. At minimum, don't stack plastic bins full of electronics on carpet in a dry room.

Corn: The ideal setup is: metallized shielding bags, inside a conductive or grounded container, in a humidity-controlled environment. And the reality for most people is: a pink bag they found in a pile, shoved in a plastic drawer under their desk.

Herman: Most of the time, they get away with it. That's the tricky thing about ESD — the failure rate isn't a hundred percent. If it were, everyone would be careful. It's a probability game. Maybe your GPU survives two years in a pink bag in a plastic bin. Maybe your RAM is fine. But every time you handle those components, every dry winter day, every shuffle of the drawer, you're rolling the dice. And the cost of not rolling the dice is literally fifty cents per bag.

Corn: There's something almost perverse about that. We'll spend four hundred dollars on a GPU and then store it in a ten-cent bag that doesn't actually protect it.

Herman: It's the same psychology as people who buy an expensive camera and then put a ten-dollar filter on the lens. The cheap thing degrades the expensive thing, but the cheap thing feels like protection, so you don't question it.

Corn: The illusion of safety is worse than no safety at all, because at least if you had no bag you'd be careful.

Herman: You'd handle it by the edges, you'd ground yourself first, you'd be mindful. The pink bag gives you permission to be careless.

Corn: Let's talk about the cold data angle specifically, because that's what kicked this whole question off. Daniel's thinking about data moved cold, physically transported, and the ESD risk during that process.

Herman: Cold data transport — moving drives and storage media physically rather than over a network — is more common than people realize. Sneakernet is still a thing. Scientific organizations move petabytes on hard drives loaded into trucks. Media production companies ship drives between editors. Even cloud providers have services where they literally mail you a storage appliance, you load it with data, and you mail it back. And every one of those physical handoffs is an ESD opportunity.

Corn: If you're a small business moving client data on an external SSD, what's the protocol?

Herman: The drive goes in a metallized shielding bag. The bag goes in a padded enclosure — anti-static foam, not regular bubble wrap. That goes in a shipping box. The box should be labeled as containing static-sensitive devices, though honestly, by the time a package reaches the courier, nobody's reading labels. The real protection is the bag and the foam. And before you seal the bag, you should equalize potential between yourself, the bag, and the drive. Touch a grounded surface, touch the outside of the bag, then put the drive in.

Corn: That's a level of discipline most people don't have. I'll admit I've never done the grounding ritual before putting something in an anti-static bag.

Herman: Most people haven't. And again, most of the time it's fine. But if you're a business handling client data, or if you're storing the only copy of something irreplaceable, the ritual matters. ESD protection is a system, not a product. The bag is one element. Grounding is another. Humidity control is another. Training and awareness is the one that's almost always missing.

Corn: Which gets to something I've been wondering. As process nodes shrink — three nanometers, two nanometers — are even metallized bags going to be enough? The gate oxides are getting thinner, the sensitivity is going up. Is there a point where passive shielding isn't sufficient?

Herman: That's the open question the industry is actively grappling with. At three nanometers, the gate oxide is down to a handful of atomic layers. The voltage required to punch through that is shrinking along with the thickness. Metallized shielding bags are still effective — the Faraday cage principle doesn't change — but the margin for error gets narrower. A bag that's slightly worn, a seal that's not quite tight, a moment of carelessness during handling — at two nanometers, that might be enough to cause damage that would have been survivable at seven nanometers.

Corn: The industry is looking at active monitoring.

Herman: Active ESD monitoring in storage environments — continuous measurement of surface charges, automated alerts when fields exceed thresholds, integration with inventory systems so you know exactly which components might have been exposed. It's the difference between a smoke detector and a fire extinguisher. Right now, most storage setups have neither. They've got a pink bag and hope.

Corn: The gap between common practice and best practice is enormous, and it's not closing. Most people who handle electronics professionally don't know the difference between static dissipative and shielding. They've never heard the term triboelectric. They see anti-static on the label and they stop thinking.

Herman: That's not their fault. The industry has done a terrible job of communicating this. Anti-static is a marketing term, not a specification. It doesn't tell you anything about surface resistivity, shielding effectiveness, or appropriate use cases. You have to dig into the technical data sheet to find out what a bag actually does, and most bags don't come with a data sheet.

Corn: What should the listener do? If you're sitting there right now with a drawer full of random electronics in random bags, what's the audit process?

Herman: First, identify the high-value, high-sensitivity items. GPUs, SSDs, single-board computers, anything with exposed circuit boards or fine-pitch components. Those go in metallized shielding bags. If they're currently in pink bags, replace them. If they're not in any bag, bag them. Second, check the condition of your existing bags. Tears, delamination, visible wear — replace. Third, look at your storage environment. Are components sitting in plastic bins on carpet? At minimum, get them off the floor and into a metal or wood cabinet. Fourth, buy a mixed pack of metallized bags in the three sizes we mentioned. It's a thirty-dollar investment that protects hundreds or thousands of dollars in hardware.

Corn: For the lower-sensitivity items — cables, connectors, packaged components — pink poly is fine for short-term storage. But if you're putting something away for months or years, metallized is always the safer choice.

Herman: The cost difference is negligible compared to the value of what you're protecting. A single GPU replacement is four hundred to a thousand dollars. A metallized bag is fifty cents. The math is not complicated.

Corn: It's funny. We spend hours researching which GPU to buy, comparing benchmarks, reading reviews, optimizing every dollar of performance. And then we wrap it in whatever bag was on top of the pile.

Herman: The most expensive component in your system deserves the most protection, not the cheapest. And ESD protection is one of those things where the right answer is boring. Buy the silvery bags. Replace them when they're worn. Don't store electronics in plastic bins on carpet. There's no hack, no shortcut, no clever workaround. Just basic materials science and a little bit of discipline.

Corn: The boring answer is usually the right one. That should be the subtitle of this show.

Herman: Speaking of boring answers that are actually fascinating if you look closely — we should talk about what happens at the material level when a discharge hits a MOSFET gate. Because the failure mechanism is genuinely wild.


Herman: The gate oxide is silicon dioxide — basically glass, but only a few hundred atoms thick. When a voltage is applied across it that exceeds the dielectric breakdown strength, you get what's called oxide punch-through. The electric field literally rips a conductive path through the insulator. Silicon from the gate electrode can migrate into the oxide layer, creating a permanent short circuit. And because the gate oxide is so thin, the capacitance is tiny — meaning it takes very little charge to raise the voltage to destructive levels.

Corn: It's not like blowing a fuse where too much current melts a wire. It's more like lightning striking a window. The voltage punches a hole straight through.

Herman: That's exactly the right image. And once that hole is there, it doesn't heal. The transistor is permanently damaged. In some cases, the damage is partial — the gate oxide is weakened but not fully shorted, and the component continues to function with degraded performance or intermittent failures. That's the latent damage scenario we talked about. It's the worst kind of failure because you can't diagnose it without electron microscopy.

Corn: This can happen at a hundred volts. A hundred volts. The static shock you get from walking across a carpet in socks is ten to twenty times that.

Herman: The carpet shock is typically ten to fifteen kilovolts. Fifteen thousand volts. A MOSFET gate can be destroyed at one-fiftieth of that. And you won't feel a thing.

Corn: That's the fact that should be printed on every anti-static bag. You cannot feel the voltage that kills this component.

Herman: It should be, but it's not. Instead, we get a yellow warning sticker with a hand inside a triangle, which tells you nothing about the actual risk. The entire consumer electronics industry has settled on a symbol that communicates caution without communicating why.

Corn: The hazard symbol equivalent of a pink poly bag. Looks protective, doesn't actually shield you from anything.

Herman: And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.

Corn: Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.

Hilbert: The word lichen was first used in English around the year 1600, borrowed from the Greek leikhen, meaning to lick — because the ancient Greeks believed lichens were a skin condition that licked the surface of rocks and trees. The Māori of New Zealand's South Island, however, had identified over forty distinct types of lichen by the time Europeans arrived, using them for everything from dyes to wound dressings to a slow-burning fire carrier made from the fluffy inner layers of large foliose species.

Corn: Lichen as a skin condition that licks rocks. I'm going to think about that every time I see one now.


Corn: To wrap this up — the question wasn't just about bags. It was about whether the things we take for granted in our inventory are actually doing their job. And the answer, for most people, is probably not. The pink bag is a security blanket. The metallized bag is actual protection. And the gap between them is measured in destroyed gate oxides and unexplained failures.

Herman: As more small organizations handle sensitive components — edge computing, distributed data, cold storage for backups and archives — ESD literacy needs to become standard knowledge, not niche expertise. The physics isn't going to get more forgiving. The components are only getting more sensitive.

Corn: Here's the challenge. Go look at your stash. The drawer of random electronics. The box of cables and cards. How many of those components are in the wrong bag? How many are in no bag at all? And what would it cost to replace them versus what it would cost to protect them properly?

Herman: If you do the audit, let us know what you find. You can reach us through the website at myweirdprompts.We'd love to hear the horror stories — and the success stories, if you've already got this figured out.

Corn: This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. We're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you listen. If you got something out of this, leave a review — it helps other people find the show. We'll be back next time.

Herman: Until then, check your bags.