I think the article is wrong in its core premise. While the electrons get added or removed from the floating gate, the total number of electrons in the SSD chip stays the same. Gates are capacitors, in order to add electrons to one capacitor plate, you have to remove an equal numbers of electrons from the other plate, i. e. from the transistor channel. The net charge of a SSD chip is always zero. Otherwise it would just go bang. <s>2.43×10^-15</s> [my bad 1] 2.67×10^15 electrons is about 300µC - that's a lot of charge to separate macroscopically.
Therefore the mass (weight is a different thing, through it is proportional to mass at a given constant gravity potential) of the data on a SSD isn't fundamentally different from a HDD - they both are caused by a change of internal energy without any change in the number of fermions. I'd expect data on SSD to have larger mass change because a charged capacitor always store more energy than a discharged one, while energy of magnetic domains is less directional and depends mostly on the state of neighbor domains - but I'm not sure about this part.
I believe TFA reads 2.43×10^-15 kg, not electrons. Unless SSDs are creating new and exciting physics, one can't have less than one electron, as it's an elementary particle.
Reminds me of an old April Fools' prank in German c't magazine. They offered a defragmentation-like tool for HDDs that claimed to distribute 0s and 1s more evenly on the drive to make it run more smoothly and extend its lifespan.
Amusingly, that's unnecessary, but possibly not for the reason most people think. It's not because the hard drive hardware is oblivious to runs of 0s and 1s exactly... it's because it's actually so sensitive that it already is recording the data in an encoding that doesn't allow for long runs of 0s and 1s. You can store a big file full of zeros on your disk and the physical representation will be about 50/50 ones and zeros on the actual storage substrate already. Nothing you do at the "data" layer can even create large runs of 0s or 1s on the physical layer in the first place. See https://www.datarecoveryunion.com/data-encoding-schemes/
interesting, I wonder if one can translate this into the amount of data on the drive ? Maybe it does not matter unless one cleared the drive using dd(1).
Also would trimming cause a different value even though the data size remains the same ? I would think so, assuming I understand trim.
I think the article is wrong in its core premise. While the electrons get added or removed from the floating gate, the total number of electrons in the SSD chip stays the same. Gates are capacitors, in order to add electrons to one capacitor plate, you have to remove an equal numbers of electrons from the other plate, i. e. from the transistor channel. The net charge of a SSD chip is always zero. Otherwise it would just go bang. <s>2.43×10^-15</s> [my bad 1] 2.67×10^15 electrons is about 300µC - that's a lot of charge to separate macroscopically.
Therefore the mass (weight is a different thing, through it is proportional to mass at a given constant gravity potential) of the data on a SSD isn't fundamentally different from a HDD - they both are caused by a change of internal energy without any change in the number of fermions. I'd expect data on SSD to have larger mass change because a charged capacitor always store more energy than a discharged one, while energy of magnetic domains is less directional and depends mostly on the state of neighbor domains - but I'm not sure about this part.
[1] Thanks stackghost.
>2.43×10^-15 electrons
I believe TFA reads 2.43×10^-15 kg, not electrons. Unless SSDs are creating new and exciting physics, one can't have less than one electron, as it's an elementary particle.
Neutrinos weight far less than electrons (but while NAND flash involves super weird physics it's not that weird)
They do weigh far less, but a quantity of "10^-15 electrons" is still impossible.
TFA started out seeming well enough written but definitely turned LLM-padded in the middle. And yeah, I think you're right about the actual science.
Reminds me of an old April Fools' prank in German c't magazine. They offered a defragmentation-like tool for HDDs that claimed to distribute 0s and 1s more evenly on the drive to make it run more smoothly and extend its lifespan.
Amusingly, that's unnecessary, but possibly not for the reason most people think. It's not because the hard drive hardware is oblivious to runs of 0s and 1s exactly... it's because it's actually so sensitive that it already is recording the data in an encoding that doesn't allow for long runs of 0s and 1s. You can store a big file full of zeros on your disk and the physical representation will be about 50/50 ones and zeros on the actual storage substrate already. Nothing you do at the "data" layer can even create large runs of 0s or 1s on the physical layer in the first place. See https://www.datarecoveryunion.com/data-encoding-schemes/
I think my network card does that.
Was expecting Boltzmann and entropy to be involved at some point :(
Yeah, I was motivated to go Wiki diving, where I just learned about the Shannon (unit). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_(unit)
Time to replace "I'm zero surprised" with "That's a zero Shannon event"
interesting, I wonder if one can translate this into the amount of data on the drive ? Maybe it does not matter unless one cleared the drive using dd(1).
Also would trimming cause a different value even though the data size remains the same ? I would think so, assuming I understand trim.