If I saved 1 byte of data on a USB drive, theoretically, would you be able to take apart the USB drive and point to where the 2nd bit of my single byte is? And if it is 0 or 1?
In: Technology
USB drives use a technology called NAND Flash.
Individual transistors are only useful for one thing which is representing a position of On or Off, 1 or 0. They are the digital version of a light switch.
In order to do anything practical with them you have to combine multiple transistors and micro circuits into circuits called Logic Gates.
The basic ones are called AND, OR, and NOT. With more advanced ones being NAND, XOR, NOR, and several others.
Basically each gate takes in certain inputs and creates outputs based on their logic. For example AND only returns a positive result if both of it’s inputs are positive. This is useful for performing math equations.
A USB drive uses NAND flash which function like NAND gates but are able to store electrical current even when the power is cut.
Each NAND gate is in a state of either 0 or 1
To answer you other question, yes you can theoretically open a USB drive and look at it with a microscope and be able to identify the specific memory cells that contain any given bit of information.
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