I barely understand floppies (somethin with magnets and a strip with magnetically sensitive stuff on it, I think) and after that I’m just lost entirely.
I’ve seen the inside of a mechanical hard drive and have seen the platters and the head. I think I know that the data is on the platters, but have no idea how it gets there, how it’s read, or how it’s erased.
And flash memory just is a whole ‘nother universe. How the hell does a [piece of plastic smaller than my thumbnail](https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/memory-cards/sandisk-extreme-uhs-i-microsd#SDSQXA1-1T00-AN6MA) store 8,000,000,000,000 ones and zeros?
In: Technology
Magnetic memory: Made up of small crystal-like structures called magnetic domains. With a high enough magnetic field, you can get all elementary magnets (ie,magnetic fields caused by the atoms) to align, and thus hold a bit of information. The smaller you can make the domains (and still be able to read/write them), the higher the density.
Flash storage: Each bit is a floating gate transistor. Basically just like a normal microchip transistor, but with an extra gate in-between, that’s not connected to anything.
If you want to write a bit, you apply a high voltage to the gate, causing electrons to “tunnel” into the floating gate, where they get trapped. If you want to read, you apply a low voltage to the gate and see if the transistor “opens”. If it does, the bit was 0, if it doesn’t (because the charge on the floating gate gets in the way) it was 1.
And ofc theses transistors can be made really small, in the scale of nanometers, with lithography. That’s why TB sizes are possible.
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