eli5 How does a computer store and read data?

Question

What mechanism is used for it? How does it work?

In: 2

Answer 1

There are two ways modern computers store data to be read later. The first is the hard disk drive (HDD). The hard disk drive are a stack of disks which store the 1s and Os as magnetism. In order to access all the disks there’s a stack of read write arms that can either impart a magnetic polarity or read one. The big limiting factor to a HDD is how fast the disks spin and how fast the arms can dart around to read the data.

The faster way is what your phone uses. These are called Solid state drives (SDD). Instead of using magnetism we store a charge itself that can then be read later. A charged cell is a 1 and and empty cell is a 0. Because there are no moving parts we aren’t limited by how fast we can move something.