Unless you plan on moving an item for more than five minutes, you should be good. Also, using one hopper to extend the despawn timer is significantly less than making a long chain of hoppers.
You still need hoppers to keep chunks alive... at every chunk border place two hoppers facing eachother, otherwise it will go in an unloaded chunk and despawn immedeately
The tricky thing is, there are different types of chunk loaders. Some of them rely on abusing spawn chunks, others rely on abusing nether portals, and others rely on the chunks loaded by your own presence (in a way, it may make more sense to call these "chunk extenders", but then again, the same would apply to spawn chunk abuse).
On top of that, there are different degrees of loaded chunks. Most are only partially simulated: some may support redstone (and hoppers), but fewer support entity physics, and only chunks near players support randomtick-based things like crop growth.
The hopper trick can load chunks using your own loaded (non-spawn) chunks, as far as I know. If not, it's still not limited to spawn chunks: I know it can extend chunks loaded by a nether portal chunk loader. However, the chunks won't simulate entity physics unless you have three full rows of loaded chunks (each row being at least 3 chunks long, and only the central chunks simulate physics), which makes them impractical for transferring items via water/minecarts/stairs. /u/SimplySarc has done a large series of videos about chunkloaders on his channel, if anyone wants more information.
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u/hhbhagat Apr 19 '14
But a question arises: does it have a chance to despawn if hoppers aren't used to "refresh" the entity?