Apparently adding computer data to a drive adds a tiny amount of mass to the drive but I don’t understand how, since surely the number of 0 and 1 changing shouldn’t change the mass of the media.
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So, APPARENTLY, data is recorded by changing the charge of a location on a hard drive. 0 is the default state, you apple an electric charge to change it to a 1 (I wont get into the specifics of what that entails).
Remember Einstein’s big equation e=mc^2. So e is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light. This equation defines a relationship between energy and mass of particles. So we have applied an electric charge to the hard drive, which is some amount of energy e. The speed of light, c, is a constant, so we can rearrange the equation to be m=e/c^2.
So for every but that is changed to a 1, you add the amount of energy required to do that divided by the speed of light squared. This is an unimaginably small amount, and I’ve seen some people disagree with the premises, but not provide reasons why it doesn’t work like that
The memory is stored as bits, 1 and 0’s, and they are in tiny microscopic transistors.
When a transistor is charged up, it switches on, and when it is discharged, it switches off.
The computer will check these transistors, and see what happens.
Something curious is that a for a lot of memory chips, the default state is FF, or a “1”, so there’s a chance some people did look into computers, realised that the memory switches are electrical, and the electrons have a mass, but they might not have considered that blank is often 11111111111 and not 0000000000. That would mean the blank state is technically the heaviest, and the more data you add, the lighter it gets.
Some computer science people might know more about SSD and RAM type default blank memory states.
It depends on the type of storage you’re talking about.
Magnetic storage, like hard drives and tape, just changes the configuration (flipping magnetic fields) but doesn’t add/remove mass.
Flash memory and it’s relatives, like solid state drives (SDDs), stores and removed charges. So they actually add and remove electrons from the drive. It’s not very many, and electrons are REALLY light, so it’s essentially undetectable, but technically those types of drives gain mass when they charge their storage cells.
It depends on the type of hard drive. Magnetic drives for example can’t change mass like that, all the 1s and 0s are are just an orientation of atoms.
In something electronic like RAM, the data is held using a feedback loop, electrons flowing through wires and transistors in such a way that they keep flowing through the same channels unless the channel is diverted externally (changing a 1 to a 0 for example). In such a circuit, there’s a higher concentration of electrons flowing through the memory cells storing a 1, in that sense, those memory cells weigh slightly more.
So, in a very real sense, 1’s are heavier than 0’s.
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