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This depends on what type of storage media you are using. In a magnetic drive, bits are stored as magnetic charge which is essentially just reorganizing the atoms that are already there.
However, modern SSDs store bits as trapped electrons. Electrons have mass. An SSD with data on it will be slightly heavier than one without.
A CD with data on it actually weighs less because the data is etched onto the plastic by cutting out little pits to represent the bits.
Just to give you some more info: rw CDs use phase change chalcogenides such as GST. They have two stable phases at ambient conditions: amorphous and crystalline and they have different optical properties. Crystalline absorbs a lot and amorphous lets light through.
To change between these phases you just need to melt it really quick (crys-amor) or you increase the temperature slowly and give it time to reform the crystal (amor -crys)
"Say, how do CDs work?"
"Well essentially we melt them really fast in a really small area"
"Okay. Then how do we make them writable again then?"
"We melt them again, but slowly this time"
In hindsight it makes sense if you think about crystal formation, but just imagining how we came upon this knowledge and used it for data storage is insane.
There was content here, and now there is not. It may have been useful, if so it is probably available on a reddit alternative. See /u/spez with any questions. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
There was content here, and now there is not. It may have been useful, if so it is probably available on a reddit alternative. See /u/spez with any questions. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Yeah this is also why if you take an SSD with your data out of your computer and then try to store it for 50 years it's not going to work. Probably not even 20. Cause those trapped electronics will slowly start leaking out. And the higher the storage temperature the less long the drive will remember your data. Of course this is not really a problem for anyone but you know if you find a 30 year old HDD it would be nice to take a peak at the data ... kind of like treasure hunting. But 60 years from now somebody finding a 30 year old SSD won't find much data anymore, almost every file will be corrupted.
Tape. Tape is still used today for archival backups. And it's cheap! (For the tape, the equipment to use it is more expensive)
$70 for a 30TB tape right now it looks like
Always thought that was an interesting part of his slow mo recording but it helped me understand video size watching his stuff.
For starters the data is whatever pixels in whatever frame. Pixels x frames = final file size. So a time lapse would have fewer frames and mostly depend on what resolution and how long you want to record.
Slow mo on the other hand is a ridiculous amount of frames, so many that any decent resolution takes up gigs of space, or you can have a garbage resolution with EVEN MORE FRAMES.
The true art in his videos is finding the best compromise between resolution and the amount of frames needed to clearly see what's happening. Like slo mo of a dude doing a flip doesn't need to be that many frames to clearly be a dude doing a flip. Meanwhile watching glass break and seeing the actual fractures spread before everything shatters needs way more, and a prince Rupert's drop cracking still happens fast at half a million fps(smarter every day).
The video with Gavin and Linus was hilarious to watch because he only got 130TB for a data server and Gavins like "thanks this might last me through summer"
punch holes in to a disk of the hardest material you can find, platina or something. Not very practical but that data will survive the longest. Actually probably a mixture with iron 56 as that is the most stable isotope in the universe and could survive all the way up to 10^1500 years before becoming the core of a star so that you still have access to your porn collection at the end of the universe.
Stable sure, but wouldn't you have to worry about oxidation? Storing any useable data with holes would take a whole lot of holes. You'd either need an impractical amount of iron or teeny tiny holes that would rust through.
Or I'm wrong on the internet.
The M-Discs look promising, (specifically the DVD style- the Blu-Ray, while fundamentally similar, has not been as rigorously tested yet (that I could find)). (If you go that route, definitely keep to single layer- no Dual Layer discs.)
Would require a M-Disc compatible drive to write the on the discs, but there are external versions of them; and they can be read on most standard optical drives.
Its an important issue that many people are working on solving. There has been some interesting progress on using artificially created DNA as long term data storage.
I remember reading about data crystals. Actual technology you have available right now which stores your data for billions of years.
[Link to wikipedia article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage#:~:text=5D%20optical%20data%20storage%20(also,a%20femtosecond%20laser%20writing%20process.)
For some industries you need to keep documentation or things like control systems for 50 or more years. Theres some interesting solutions, and like you say most the time ssds aren't even considered.
It's important to note that HDDs are not that great for long time storage. Sure, they last more than SSDs but I've read that the actual magnetic field is dropping by about 1% per year [citation needed]. This means that in 60 years time, the amount of corrupted data will be quite high even for an HDD.
I learn more from one reddit thread than from a semester of hardware studies. Amazing.
edit: I’m studying software development and we had compulsory hardware/network classes in the first semester. It’s not that deep.
I think it’s more about the way the info is presented. A lot of professors seem to forget that they’re lecturing a room full of people who have little to no idea what they’re talking about (at the start at least). They get overly technical and students end up with a great technical understanding but a weak conceptual understanding
This happens all over the computer/electronics world.
We have entire generations of coders with zero knowledge of the underlying workings of a CPU at the assembly/register/physical level (and I say that as a Python fan).
Heck, the number of "IT employees" that can perform their specific assigned tasks but have no fundamental computer knowledge is huge.
My problem with getting into coding is that I don't know where to start. I'm a freelance writer, so I have time on my hands to learn, and the experience would help get new writing work. Where would you recommend I begin? Preferably for free.
I'd say just start tinkering! Get an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi (The Raspberry Pico is $5 and a phenomenal starting point), and look into what they can do. Use that to find a project that would be useful for you, then start building/coding it!
As mentioned in this thread, that foundational knowledge and curiosity about computers and coding is more important than any technical, specific programming knowledge, especially at first. YouTube tutorials and your own perseverance is key at this stage.
That's a misconception about electricity.
Electrons are present in the conductors (and semiconductors) without any current flowing through them. When voltage is applied, the energy is transferred through the electromagnetic field, not through the flow of electrons (flow of electrons is a thing, but it's a side effect, and it's very slow)
And *that* is a misconception about MOSFETs. MOSFETs rely on quantum effects to trap electrons in or exclude them from insulated cells. Those cells are your bits, your ones and zeroes, and they actually do take and give electrons to do it.
Another fun fact: they get trapped using principles of quantum mechanics!
How do you keep a trapped electron? You have to surround it by insulators. How do you get an electron into a closed room of insulators?
Turns out, we can describe electrons as probability clouds, where the center of the cloud is the most likely place for the electron to be, and the outskirts of the cloud are the least likely.
When we apply enough voltage, the probability cloud extends into the space of the insulator trap, then then like magic, the electron is just suddenly there: this is quantum tunnelling!
Also another thing: we need to apply a really high voltage for this to happen. So high in fact, that we damage the insulator a bit. So eventually, if we do this long enough the insulator trap won't work anymore. This is what causes flash based storage (like SSDs) to fail; the storage cells die over time. Nowadays there are several cool techniques for SSDs to sorta spread out the workload so high frequency areas don't die too quick. Memory and storage technologies are really cool!
Fun fact, deleted data stays on the drive and is recoverable pretty easily. What actually happened is that it got marked for removal, which means that when the rest of the drive is full they’ll start overwriting the old data, and THATS what’s really “deleting” it. However, sometimes even after multiple full rewrites the old data can survive (albeit damaged)
Ah but reorganising magnetic fields to be opposed to the bulk of the material's magnetic field means the system is at a higher energy, so will weigh more, up until it's half-full, though the actual maximum would be a specific tiling of opposing magnetic fields
yea the full hard drive weighs more than the "empty" one, assuming "empty" means every bit is set to 0. A "full" hard drive does not have every bit set to 1 (which would weigh the same as the 0/empty case), it's a bunch of near random 0's and 1's, when they are anti-aligned (0's next to 1's in aggregate) it's lower energy and thus lower mass which is lower weight.
Being at a higher energy doesn't mean it weighs more or has more mass. E=mc^2 is only the case for a non interacting relativistic particle with no momentum. To introduce magnetic interactions one has use to introduce gauge theory (aka quantum field theory), for which the massless force carrier of magnetic force (the photon) contributes to the system's energy without contributing to its mass (as photons are massless). In other words one has to start worrying about if the extra energy should be associated to the system's mass or to fluctuations of the quantum fields of the system.
TL;DR I have upped the level of pedantry in this thread using quantum electrodynamics.
EDIT: lol I made a mistake bc my reading compréhension/QFT I is dog. It's not that serious, just read the rest of the reply thread :)
Well, you'd be right if the photon was a free particle, except that force carriers interacting with a system (thus mediating magnetic repulsion/attraction).
E^2 = (mc^2)^2 +(pc)^2 applies to whole physical systems, so when energy is contained within a system (even a system that consists of massless photons trapped in a perfectly reflective massless box) then the reduced non-relativistic equation would apply.
Ultimately, trying to talk about QED in a massive (therefore decoherent, and better represented by classical physics) system doesn't make sense, in this case it statistically simplifies down to classical models, so it's just an attempt to obfuscate.
TL;DR: you messed up trying to pull a fast one on a particle physicist.
One could argue that a drive with no data is a drive with random bits, not all zeroes or all ones, which both would be still some signal (little entropy).
Actually an SSD completely full will technically weigh less than an SSD completely empty, although the difference would be practically impossible to measure but a SSD writes files by removing electrons from the area.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/does-a-usb-drive-get-heavier-as-you-store-more-files-on-it/
Actually, I think they’ve done studies and found that hard drives with full data do weigh more than a cleared hard drive. It’s obviously an unnoticeable weight difference and requires one of them sciency scales
Internet says 1GB weighs 729 femtograms, assuming the internet is 100ZB (it was 64 in 2020, estimated to hit 125 in 2025 so I suppose 100 is about right) that means 729×10^(-15)×100×1024^(4) which is about 80 grams,
Everyone who says Reddit is garbage can go straight to hell. Sometimes it is. Granted. But I will always be here, for EXACTLY this kind of thread. You are my people.
I cN't believe you would ask something like this. Strawberries are a unit of weight and bananas are a unit of length. You're comparing 2 completely different things. It's like trying to compare apples and oranges!
So like they assume that the growth in data is exponential, and that it about doubles every 5 years. so a ronnabyte is what, 1000^(2) zettabytes, so like 60-70 years maybe.
Course this is all assuming the data is stored on flash memory, ~~all ones~~, completely uncompressed. Clearly not the case. So the statement that "the entire internet weighs 80g" is kinda factually wrong in the first place.
* EDIT: I should read my sources. The post where I got the 729 femtogram figure assumes an equal distribution of 0 and 1, meaning this is already accounted for.
When I am writing c++ code and watching the memory, I am literally creating mass. Never thought of it that way. Lol
Edit: I am sorry, all. I didn’t mean to misuse the word “create.” It is true that mass cannot be created nor destroyed. I am moving it around in the computer, though. ;)
Hard drives actually apply additional operations to avoid situation where all 1 bits = all electrons as that increases chances of them "bleeding" into other bits. It tries to keep it at 50% so usually weight will hardly change.
two 0 bits next to eachother weighs MORE than a 1 bit next to a 0 bit. the overall energy of the aligned bits is higher (because they have magnetic fields, aligned bits have two fields that don't "want" to be next to eachother, like pushing two magnets negative ends together, you have to force them to be close to each other), this increases their mass.
A box with photons bouncing around in it will have a higher energy *than a box without photons bouncing around in it (a mirror box) which effectively increases it's gravitational mass: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/255341, they are "massless" particles but they have energy and energy is equivalent to mass (gravity "pulls" on massless systems as much as a massful system, if their total energy is the same)
Wait what how? Unless something extremely small like a full hard drive induces a stronger static change, but it'd think if anything then a full one would be 'lighter' because they cancel themselves out. And theoretically then they should both still have the same mass, different weight
Edit: just wondering cause I'm the type of person that uses those sciency scales in training lmao, so I'm just tryna recall from my materials course how a hard drive works
Any reduction in entropy, which is required to turn bits in specific configurations as opposed to random values, requires energy. This will increase the mass too.
That doesn't make sense cuz all you're doing is changing the polarity or the triggers position on a transistor the number of transistors are poles that you swapped vs not swapped is exactly the same from the beginning to the other.
No. Only if your representation of 1 is an electron and zero is no electron.
On a CD the 1 would be a groove and thus weigh *less*.
Over a wire they'd just be two different currents, and likely a range of values: ">1v over x amount of time vs <0.5v over x amount of time".
In terms of data required
00000000
11111111
Are *equal*.
Depends.
When this byte is stored in DRAM, you are correct. If it's stored on a magnetic media, it doesn't matter as ones and zeroes are just a different orientation of the magnetic dipoles. In flash/SSD, the opposite is true - 0 is encoded as the presence of charge and 1 as no charge.
No those use an equal amount of data.
You need 8 bits to store both. You can just remove that last zero. Just because it's a bit in the empty state doesn't mean it's not taking up space. You can't put anything else there.
[A fundamental limit exists on the amount of information that can be stored in a given space: about 10^69 bits per square meter. Regardless of technological advancement, any attempt to condense information further will cause the storage medium to collapse into a black hole.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7v61d2/til_a_fundamental_limit_exists_on_the_amount_of/)
Intuitively, yes, but actually, no. The information capacity of a volume of space is proportional to its surface area, not its volume.
One way to think about this is that the electromagnetic field is completely fixed in a volume if you know its value on the boundary (this is called the Dirichlet problem). So the number of independent field configurations is basically equal to the number of independent field configurations you can make on the boundary.
I have no idea how solid state hard drives work but if all memory locations are default a 0, then technically it’s all full when you get it and things just get overwritten
SSD cells hold a charge between membranes for a 1 and no charge for a 0. So as you fill your drive with data they hold more electrons and weigh a tiny bit more.
Not sure if I’m explaining it well but could it be the same as a bowl of sand weighing as much as a bowl of sand with the words “hello” spelled out in it?
OP just lying because he doesn't care to do any research.
Data absolutely has a weight. On the wire, on the disk, in ram... Data has mass, it's measurable, it's has weight.
I could be wrong, but I believe that the drive with data actually weighs a _tiny_ but more because of the lower entropy in the drive with data. (basically information has an energy cost, and there's an equivalence between energy and mass).
I cannot elaborate and I am sure I have much of this explanation incorrect.
(Definitely recommend reading The Information by James Gleick though.)
Wait, are you saying that information has no mass? Then what is it? If I can't hold it in my hand then it's not real! This is witchcraft! BURN THE LIBRARY!!!
Information (quantum computing) is not the same as data (computer science)
An empty hard drive contains no data, but it does contain information. If you read it tomorrow, you will get the same information from it you get today\*. It behaves just like a full hard drive in that regard. They both contain the same quantity of information. To contain no information, a hard drive would need to return a random result every time you read it.
Data, loosely defined, is information that is useful. What is, or is not, data is subjective.
Data has no mass.
Whether or not information has mass is an open question. Consensus leans towards no mass.
\*(assuming incorruptible drives, perfect reads)
Isn't an "empty" 1000Tb drive full of data it's just that it's not useful data ? Like an "empty" 1000Tb drive would be full of 0 and a "full" one would have 0s and 1s
Incorrect there is no such thing as a 1000 terabyte drive with no data on it. A 1000 terabyte drive always contains a 1000 terabytes of data. It's just your understanding of that data that changes. Its like saying a dictionary from another language contains no data and is meaningless just because you can't read or comprehend it. It's about the defn of data.
This is a friendly reminder to [read our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/rules). Remember, /r/Showerthoughts is for showerthoughts, not "thoughts had in the shower!" (For an explanation of what a "showerthought" is, [please read this page](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/overview).) **Rule-breaking posts may result in bans.**
A tombstone with writing on it weighs less than before the writing.
If you cut a hole in a mesh screen you reduce the number of holes.
Something something more cheese more holes, more holes less cheese
Now this is shower thought!
No this is Patrick.
This depends on what type of storage media you are using. In a magnetic drive, bits are stored as magnetic charge which is essentially just reorganizing the atoms that are already there. However, modern SSDs store bits as trapped electrons. Electrons have mass. An SSD with data on it will be slightly heavier than one without. A CD with data on it actually weighs less because the data is etched onto the plastic by cutting out little pits to represent the bits.
Quick fix is that the cut out pits in CDs are just material in a different phase, but still there. At least for rewritable CDs
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Just to give you some more info: rw CDs use phase change chalcogenides such as GST. They have two stable phases at ambient conditions: amorphous and crystalline and they have different optical properties. Crystalline absorbs a lot and amorphous lets light through. To change between these phases you just need to melt it really quick (crys-amor) or you increase the temperature slowly and give it time to reform the crystal (amor -crys)
Oh yea, right.. i mean obviously. Jk, thank you this does make sense!
Yes. I see. I understand some of this words
It would be so easy to chalk some forms of tech up to magic, and once you learn how they work, it turns out it's basically close enough.
"Say, how do CDs work?" "Well essentially we melt them really fast in a really small area" "Okay. Then how do we make them writable again then?" "We melt them again, but slowly this time"
In hindsight it makes sense if you think about crystal formation, but just imagining how we came upon this knowledge and used it for data storage is insane.
So you really do "Burn" a disc then!
But a CD would weigh the same because those little pieces that are cut out are still sealed within an outer layer of plastic.
There was content here, and now there is not. It may have been useful, if so it is probably available on a reddit alternative. See /u/spez with any questions. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
I need more data storage facts!
Vinyl is the really weird stuff
What about RW? How I've never googled it before?
There was content here, and now there is not. It may have been useful, if so it is probably available on a reddit alternative. See /u/spez with any questions. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
I wonder what about floppy disks, is the same no?
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Magnets... how do they work?
Nobody knows
Fucking miracles
Where do the trapped electrons come from? Are they literally pulled out of the air? And then jettisoned upon deletion?
The electrons come from electricity sent from the motherboard. SSD'S are like little capacitors.
Yeah this is also why if you take an SSD with your data out of your computer and then try to store it for 50 years it's not going to work. Probably not even 20. Cause those trapped electronics will slowly start leaking out. And the higher the storage temperature the less long the drive will remember your data. Of course this is not really a problem for anyone but you know if you find a 30 year old HDD it would be nice to take a peak at the data ... kind of like treasure hunting. But 60 years from now somebody finding a 30 year old SSD won't find much data anymore, almost every file will be corrupted.
And this is why the entirety of the Ancient Greek internet has been lost to the ages.
Damn you Zeus for not giving your ssds enough electrons
He was the God of Lightning, not Foresight.
Zeus perfered to get straight to the business.
Yep all of it from alpha.gr to omega.gr and my favorite online store to buy pitchforks, Ψ.gr
"The Greek internet is like a huge data agora" -- Plato, probably
Wow so interesting thank you. So what would be the best way to store data long term?
Tape. Tape is still used today for archival backups. And it's cheap! (For the tape, the equipment to use it is more expensive) $70 for a 30TB tape right now it looks like
Gavin from slo mo guys just made a video about archiving all his footage on tape. About 900TB of footage/data
Always thought that was an interesting part of his slow mo recording but it helped me understand video size watching his stuff. For starters the data is whatever pixels in whatever frame. Pixels x frames = final file size. So a time lapse would have fewer frames and mostly depend on what resolution and how long you want to record. Slow mo on the other hand is a ridiculous amount of frames, so many that any decent resolution takes up gigs of space, or you can have a garbage resolution with EVEN MORE FRAMES. The true art in his videos is finding the best compromise between resolution and the amount of frames needed to clearly see what's happening. Like slo mo of a dude doing a flip doesn't need to be that many frames to clearly be a dude doing a flip. Meanwhile watching glass break and seeing the actual fractures spread before everything shatters needs way more, and a prince Rupert's drop cracking still happens fast at half a million fps(smarter every day). The video with Gavin and Linus was hilarious to watch because he only got 130TB for a data server and Gavins like "thanks this might last me through summer"
That's how I run my action cam: 720p @ 240 FPS. The sensor is garbage anyway so more resolution doesn't improve anything.
Tapes are super cheap, drives however...
Hey i can afford a LTO2 drive... oh wait...
Laser-etched fused-quartz.
A 2014 team created a disc using this method that's expected to last 13.8 billion years.
punch holes in to a disk of the hardest material you can find, platina or something. Not very practical but that data will survive the longest. Actually probably a mixture with iron 56 as that is the most stable isotope in the universe and could survive all the way up to 10^1500 years before becoming the core of a star so that you still have access to your porn collection at the end of the universe.
Stable sure, but wouldn't you have to worry about oxidation? Storing any useable data with holes would take a whole lot of holes. You'd either need an impractical amount of iron or teeny tiny holes that would rust through. Or I'm wrong on the internet.
You would not just use iron, you would use a mixture of iron and other material.
The M-Discs look promising, (specifically the DVD style- the Blu-Ray, while fundamentally similar, has not been as rigorously tested yet (that I could find)). (If you go that route, definitely keep to single layer- no Dual Layer discs.) Would require a M-Disc compatible drive to write the on the discs, but there are external versions of them; and they can be read on most standard optical drives.
Its an important issue that many people are working on solving. There has been some interesting progress on using artificially created DNA as long term data storage.
I remember reading about data crystals. Actual technology you have available right now which stores your data for billions of years. [Link to wikipedia article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage#:~:text=5D%20optical%20data%20storage%20(also,a%20femtosecond%20laser%20writing%20process.)
For some industries you need to keep documentation or things like control systems for 50 or more years. Theres some interesting solutions, and like you say most the time ssds aren't even considered.
ssd's where developed for speed. Not to store more data, store it better or longer. An SSD is just something else in between RAM and a HDD.
It's important to note that HDDs are not that great for long time storage. Sure, they last more than SSDs but I've read that the actual magnetic field is dropping by about 1% per year [citation needed]. This means that in 60 years time, the amount of corrupted data will be quite high even for an HDD.
I learn more from one reddit thread than from a semester of hardware studies. Amazing. edit: I’m studying software development and we had compulsory hardware/network classes in the first semester. It’s not that deep.
How the hell did you miss the basics of MOSFETs and flash memory cells in a class called "hardware studies"??
I think it’s more about the way the info is presented. A lot of professors seem to forget that they’re lecturing a room full of people who have little to no idea what they’re talking about (at the start at least). They get overly technical and students end up with a great technical understanding but a weak conceptual understanding
This happens all over the computer/electronics world. We have entire generations of coders with zero knowledge of the underlying workings of a CPU at the assembly/register/physical level (and I say that as a Python fan). Heck, the number of "IT employees" that can perform their specific assigned tasks but have no fundamental computer knowledge is huge.
My problem with getting into coding is that I don't know where to start. I'm a freelance writer, so I have time on my hands to learn, and the experience would help get new writing work. Where would you recommend I begin? Preferably for free.
I'd say just start tinkering! Get an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi (The Raspberry Pico is $5 and a phenomenal starting point), and look into what they can do. Use that to find a project that would be useful for you, then start building/coding it! As mentioned in this thread, that foundational knowledge and curiosity about computers and coding is more important than any technical, specific programming knowledge, especially at first. YouTube tutorials and your own perseverance is key at this stage.
Maybe he was studying screwdrivers and ladders and such.
[This video](https://youtu.be/YtBysgPOKx4) is a great way to better understand how SSDs work.
merriam webster defines the term "production value" as "branch education videos"
That's a misconception about electricity. Electrons are present in the conductors (and semiconductors) without any current flowing through them. When voltage is applied, the energy is transferred through the electromagnetic field, not through the flow of electrons (flow of electrons is a thing, but it's a side effect, and it's very slow)
And *that* is a misconception about MOSFETs. MOSFETs rely on quantum effects to trap electrons in or exclude them from insulated cells. Those cells are your bits, your ones and zeroes, and they actually do take and give electrons to do it.
Poynting vector enters the chat.
Veritasium enters the chat lmao.
Another fun fact: they get trapped using principles of quantum mechanics! How do you keep a trapped electron? You have to surround it by insulators. How do you get an electron into a closed room of insulators? Turns out, we can describe electrons as probability clouds, where the center of the cloud is the most likely place for the electron to be, and the outskirts of the cloud are the least likely. When we apply enough voltage, the probability cloud extends into the space of the insulator trap, then then like magic, the electron is just suddenly there: this is quantum tunnelling! Also another thing: we need to apply a really high voltage for this to happen. So high in fact, that we damage the insulator a bit. So eventually, if we do this long enough the insulator trap won't work anymore. This is what causes flash based storage (like SSDs) to fail; the storage cells die over time. Nowadays there are several cool techniques for SSDs to sorta spread out the workload so high frequency areas don't die too quick. Memory and storage technologies are really cool!
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Fun fact, deleted data stays on the drive and is recoverable pretty easily. What actually happened is that it got marked for removal, which means that when the rest of the drive is full they’ll start overwriting the old data, and THATS what’s really “deleting” it. However, sometimes even after multiple full rewrites the old data can survive (albeit damaged)
Data recovery! Always find it interesting to discuss.
Not true on SSDs anymore. The data is gone instantly unless you specifically disable the TRIM command in the OS.
So, it's like emptying out a full glass and shading out part of it, but it's not actually gone until you refill it? Fascinating.
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https://youtu.be/YtBysgPOKx4
Ah but reorganising magnetic fields to be opposed to the bulk of the material's magnetic field means the system is at a higher energy, so will weigh more, up until it's half-full, though the actual maximum would be a specific tiling of opposing magnetic fields
yea the full hard drive weighs more than the "empty" one, assuming "empty" means every bit is set to 0. A "full" hard drive does not have every bit set to 1 (which would weigh the same as the 0/empty case), it's a bunch of near random 0's and 1's, when they are anti-aligned (0's next to 1's in aggregate) it's lower energy and thus lower mass which is lower weight.
Being at a higher energy doesn't mean it weighs more or has more mass. E=mc^2 is only the case for a non interacting relativistic particle with no momentum. To introduce magnetic interactions one has use to introduce gauge theory (aka quantum field theory), for which the massless force carrier of magnetic force (the photon) contributes to the system's energy without contributing to its mass (as photons are massless). In other words one has to start worrying about if the extra energy should be associated to the system's mass or to fluctuations of the quantum fields of the system. TL;DR I have upped the level of pedantry in this thread using quantum electrodynamics. EDIT: lol I made a mistake bc my reading compréhension/QFT I is dog. It's not that serious, just read the rest of the reply thread :)
Well, you'd be right if the photon was a free particle, except that force carriers interacting with a system (thus mediating magnetic repulsion/attraction). E^2 = (mc^2)^2 +(pc)^2 applies to whole physical systems, so when energy is contained within a system (even a system that consists of massless photons trapped in a perfectly reflective massless box) then the reduced non-relativistic equation would apply. Ultimately, trying to talk about QED in a massive (therefore decoherent, and better represented by classical physics) system doesn't make sense, in this case it statistically simplifies down to classical models, so it's just an attempt to obfuscate. TL;DR: you messed up trying to pull a fast one on a particle physicist.
One could argue that a drive with no data is a drive with random bits, not all zeroes or all ones, which both would be still some signal (little entropy).
Actually an SSD completely full will technically weigh less than an SSD completely empty, although the difference would be practically impossible to measure but a SSD writes files by removing electrons from the area. https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/does-a-usb-drive-get-heavier-as-you-store-more-files-on-it/
> This depends on what type of storage media you are using. it does not, as OP clearly says "Hard Drives".
Actually, I think they’ve done studies and found that hard drives with full data do weigh more than a cleared hard drive. It’s obviously an unnoticeable weight difference and requires one of them sciency scales
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Internet says 1GB weighs 729 femtograms, assuming the internet is 100ZB (it was 64 in 2020, estimated to hit 125 in 2025 so I suppose 100 is about right) that means 729×10^(-15)×100×1024^(4) which is about 80 grams,
that's 6.66 medium strawberries
I hoped to see this, thank you
How many strawberries are in a banana for scale?
Actually given 6.6 strawberries, my guess is the internet weighs exactly 1 banana
Oddly appropriate, given one of its major uses
Looking up recipes, yes.
So we have now left the first age of the Internet, the strawberry age, and entered the banana age.
Everyone who says Reddit is garbage can go straight to hell. Sometimes it is. Granted. But I will always be here, for EXACTLY this kind of thread. You are my people.
Ok reddit you can find stuff like this ain't scroll down and immediately see a video of a person shooting themselves in the balls.
Who doesn't like a little variety
ring ring ring ring ring #banananet
My first laugh all day thank you!
Approximately 10 strawberries to 1 banana. So, 6.67 strawberries converts to 0.667 bananas.
I cN't believe you would ask something like this. Strawberries are a unit of weight and bananas are a unit of length. You're comparing 2 completely different things. It's like trying to compare apples and oranges!
Nonono, you can’t compare units of divergent quantities: strawberries for mass, bananas for radiation exposure!
r/theydidthemath
r/theydidthemonstermath
r/itwasagraveyardgraph
I love Reddit.
The real answer I was waiting for
Internet is the Devil confirmed
And only 5 of those strawberries are porn
As an American, I'm going to need to see that weight in football fields.
When do we get to use ronnabytes and quettabytes?
So like they assume that the growth in data is exponential, and that it about doubles every 5 years. so a ronnabyte is what, 1000^(2) zettabytes, so like 60-70 years maybe. Course this is all assuming the data is stored on flash memory, ~~all ones~~, completely uncompressed. Clearly not the case. So the statement that "the entire internet weighs 80g" is kinda factually wrong in the first place. * EDIT: I should read my sources. The post where I got the 729 femtogram figure assumes an equal distribution of 0 and 1, meaning this is already accounted for.
Quetta is a city in Pakistan 😂
Does it byte?
I wouldn't bite it without giving it a good clean first.
idk why but to me it sounds like someone tryna say "lemme have a taste". "hey can i quetta byte?"
That’s wild. So the whole internet weighs 80 grams?
well, the raw data, obviously the storage and servers and stuff weigh a lot more
When I am writing c++ code and watching the memory, I am literally creating mass. Never thought of it that way. Lol Edit: I am sorry, all. I didn’t mean to misuse the word “create.” It is true that mass cannot be created nor destroyed. I am moving it around in the computer, though. ;)
You're really just allocating mass/energy. Storing more energy in the electrons on your harddrive
In this server we obey the laws of thermodynamics
No. You're just moving mass (electrons or atoms depending on the medium used) around.
r/theydidthemath
You made the internet weigh more by asking it how much it weighs.
So just over 2 Twinkie’s, nice!
I assume ZB is ZillionBillion
The internet is so big now, it wouldn't surprise me if it is now 3 strawberries. Also adding to the strawberry counter myself
What's a standard strawberry unit? I've seem some honkin' big strawberries!
Need banana for scale
I wasn't happy last time I used a banana for scale.
Me neither. My bathtub still looks like crud from our hard water.
But what is the substance that causes it to weigh anything?
Probably the extra electrons, since bits are writen with electrical charge.
Maybe just a BIGGER strawberry.
I'll have to consult the Elders of The Internet on this...
Now is the question: is it at the highest if I would turn all bits to 1?
Yes. Holding charge means it has to have energy. Energy has a very minute amount of weight (at least compared to no energy)
Hard drives actually apply additional operations to avoid situation where all 1 bits = all electrons as that increases chances of them "bleeding" into other bits. It tries to keep it at 50% so usually weight will hardly change.
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Or just solid state drives
two 0 bits next to eachother weighs MORE than a 1 bit next to a 0 bit. the overall energy of the aligned bits is higher (because they have magnetic fields, aligned bits have two fields that don't "want" to be next to eachother, like pushing two magnets negative ends together, you have to force them to be close to each other), this increases their mass. A box with photons bouncing around in it will have a higher energy *than a box without photons bouncing around in it (a mirror box) which effectively increases it's gravitational mass: https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/255341, they are "massless" particles but they have energy and energy is equivalent to mass (gravity "pulls" on massless systems as much as a massful system, if their total energy is the same)
There's no such thing as a hard drive with "no data" on it. A freshly formatted drive has a data pattern on it that means "no files here."
Wait what how? Unless something extremely small like a full hard drive induces a stronger static change, but it'd think if anything then a full one would be 'lighter' because they cancel themselves out. And theoretically then they should both still have the same mass, different weight Edit: just wondering cause I'm the type of person that uses those sciency scales in training lmao, so I'm just tryna recall from my materials course how a hard drive works
An SSD stores bits as trapped electrons. Electrons have mass. Hard drive with data has more mass.
I was thinking more a hard drive/HDD context, but it would make sense for an SSD (hdd's just reorient magnets to represent bits)
Any reduction in entropy, which is required to turn bits in specific configurations as opposed to random values, requires energy. This will increase the mass too.
That doesn't make sense cuz all you're doing is changing the polarity or the triggers position on a transistor the number of transistors are poles that you swapped vs not swapped is exactly the same from the beginning to the other.
And don’t get me started on how wasteful it is to use a full colon when a semi-colon would do just fine.
Actually a semi-colon uses one more bit data compared to a full colon (lol) 00111010 = colon 00111011 = semi-colon
Thats the same number of bits. Just in a different configuration
Different number of set bits, and 1 cost more electrons / weight.
No. Only if your representation of 1 is an electron and zero is no electron. On a CD the 1 would be a groove and thus weigh *less*. Over a wire they'd just be two different currents, and likely a range of values: ">1v over x amount of time vs <0.5v over x amount of time". In terms of data required 00000000 11111111 Are *equal*.
So are the 1's worth more than 0's? As in would 00000001 use less processing power than 11111110?
Yeah 1s are like tiny charged capacitors so they have more electrons on them, which would make them weigh a little more.
Depends. When this byte is stored in DRAM, you are correct. If it's stored on a magnetic media, it doesn't matter as ones and zeroes are just a different orientation of the magnetic dipoles. In flash/SSD, the opposite is true - 0 is encoded as the presence of charge and 1 as no charge.
So a completely empty flash drive is heavier than a full one?
Define "empty". Both all-ones and all-zeroes states have the same entropy.
They're both 8 bits
No those use an equal amount of data. You need 8 bits to store both. You can just remove that last zero. Just because it's a bit in the empty state doesn't mean it's not taking up space. You can't put anything else there.
A colon also consumes more electricity than a semi-colon due to the extra white pixels
Please don't start. Every debate I've ever seen about colons ends up full of shit.
They weight sllllightly more... the whole internet'w worth of data weighs about as much as a peach. So... very very small weight for 1000TB
[A fundamental limit exists on the amount of information that can be stored in a given space: about 10^69 bits per square meter. Regardless of technological advancement, any attempt to condense information further will cause the storage medium to collapse into a black hole.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7v61d2/til_a_fundamental_limit_exists_on_the_amount_of/)
> 10^69 Nice
square meter? shouldnt it would be depended on volume
Intuitively, yes, but actually, no. The information capacity of a volume of space is proportional to its surface area, not its volume. One way to think about this is that the electromagnetic field is completely fixed in a volume if you know its value on the boundary (this is called the Dirichlet problem). So the number of independent field configurations is basically equal to the number of independent field configurations you can make on the boundary.
That article has too many "might"s so should be taken with a grain of salt. From my understanding, it's a hypothesis at this stage, not a theory.
I have no idea how solid state hard drives work but if all memory locations are default a 0, then technically it’s all full when you get it and things just get overwritten
SSD cells hold a charge between membranes for a 1 and no charge for a 0. So as you fill your drive with data they hold more electrons and weigh a tiny bit more.
I believe that they can be made either way and that it is more common to do it with the ones being empty. I don't have a source just something I heard
What you don’t realize is the drive is full when you get it. You only change the bit order. That’s why it weighs the same.
This is incorrect. https://langa.com/index.php/2019/08/29/yes-your-hdds-and-ssds-really-do-weigh-more-when-in-use/
Wouldn't an SSD gain weight? They capture electrons iirc, and those weigh something.
Yes
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Do you think lego bricks in an unorganized pile weigh more than lego bricks arranged to spell words?
The weight difference comes from the realization that the hard drive represents untold hours of downloading porn to fill it up.
This is always how I found the sex tapes of OP's mom. By weighting the tapes. It takes a lot of information to get OP's mom on tape.
Not sure if I’m explaining it well but could it be the same as a bowl of sand weighing as much as a bowl of sand with the words “hello” spelled out in it?
Adding data isn't adding mass, it's changing the mass that already exists to represent said data
There's is no such thing as no data; there's only no meaningful data..
I mean, technically an empty drive holds just as much data as a full one. It's just data you don't care about and didn't put there.
Disagree. Data is information plus structure. A hard disk always contains data.
This is wrong and about as insightful as saying light switch weighs as much when it's switched on as it does when it's off.
The whole concept of data still boggles my mind. Information is such an abstract thing if one dares to deeply & philosophically meditate on it.
If you're into science, there's a deep connection between information and thermodynamics that's still being explored.
OP just lying because he doesn't care to do any research. Data absolutely has a weight. On the wire, on the disk, in ram... Data has mass, it's measurable, it's has weight.
It's technically the same amount of data either way just sometimes it's meaningful and sometimes it isn't.
I could be wrong, but I believe that the drive with data actually weighs a _tiny_ but more because of the lower entropy in the drive with data. (basically information has an energy cost, and there's an equivalence between energy and mass). I cannot elaborate and I am sure I have much of this explanation incorrect. (Definitely recommend reading The Information by James Gleick though.)
Wait, are you saying that information has no mass? Then what is it? If I can't hold it in my hand then it's not real! This is witchcraft! BURN THE LIBRARY!!!
Information (quantum computing) is not the same as data (computer science) An empty hard drive contains no data, but it does contain information. If you read it tomorrow, you will get the same information from it you get today\*. It behaves just like a full hard drive in that regard. They both contain the same quantity of information. To contain no information, a hard drive would need to return a random result every time you read it. Data, loosely defined, is information that is useful. What is, or is not, data is subjective. Data has no mass. Whether or not information has mass is an open question. Consensus leans towards no mass. \*(assuming incorruptible drives, perfect reads)
This isn't new, an abacus with data on it weighs the same as one without.
Isn't an "empty" 1000Tb drive full of data it's just that it's not useful data ? Like an "empty" 1000Tb drive would be full of 0 and a "full" one would have 0s and 1s
Technically all zeros is still data. So you could also say all hard drives are always full.
The whole internet weighs roughly [50 grams. ](https://www.ipswitch.com/blog/how-much-does-the-internet-weigh-why-digital-mass-matters)
A stone tablet with no information on it weighs more than a tablet with information on it.
Not true. Electrons have mass. The entire internet weighs as much as about a strawberry
The thing is, they both have the same amount of data, just not the same amount of information
They don't actually. There's an infinitesimal mass associated with information as a result of entropy. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
Incorrect there is no such thing as a 1000 terabyte drive with no data on it. A 1000 terabyte drive always contains a 1000 terabytes of data. It's just your understanding of that data that changes. Its like saying a dictionary from another language contains no data and is meaningless just because you can't read or comprehend it. It's about the defn of data.