How do the computers, phones, hard drives, USB pen drives, and even cloud drives get storages? How is it produced or manufactured? Why is it in the power of 2s?
In: Technology
Let’s start with the basics: data stored is stored in bits – a bit can have two states: 0 or 1. When you combine these bits, you’ll inevitably end with a system that works in the powers of 2’s, as you put it.
Now, why 0 or 1? Because its the easiest way to express data through magnetic or electrical charge. This is where the material used in storage comes in: you can use magnetic disks, that retain a positive or negative charge over a long time, to store sequences of 1’s and 0’s. This can also be done with circuits that keep a charge, same principle.
Okay so how does that become a hdd, for example? Well, hard disk drives are relatively primitive, essentially its multiple disks of that magnetic material stacked over another, with a motor attached to spin them and an arm with a sensor on it for ever disk, swinging over it to read the disk – its as mechanical as it gets.
But how did we compress that tech into usb-sticks? We took the mechanical component and made it digital: microscopic transistors that can hold a charge, even when no power us applied, are used to simulate what the hdd does via its magnetic disks.
Bonus fact: thats why these solid state drives are faster than any hdd – there’s no physical step in the process of reading storage.
I hope this answers your questions somewhat.
This is an hard one to reply because the technologies vary wildly between devices. HDD are monumentally different from SSDs, which are relatively more similar to RAMs, but still very different.
In short: HDDs store information via magnetisation. As you might know, digital information is encoded as strings of 0s and 1s; you could either magnetise or not a point on a disk, and decide that the former means 1 and then latter means 0.
Most other storage technologies rely on transistors. Simplifying *a lot*, a transistor has a state: either it blocks a current or it doesn’t, based on this state. So you could try to send a signal through it: if you receive it on the other end, then you decide it means 1. Mind you, this is an overwhelming simplification. Depending on what kind of memory you need, you design it to exploit this behaviour, so you bind this state to the information you’re storing. (FYI the term “state” is very wrong and I’m using it deliberately for simplicity’s sake in this context)
Some transistors used in stuff like SSDs are technologically different from the ones used in a processor though, but we’d be digging too deep into the question; just mentioning it.
The storage is built in, in any of a variety of ways (hard drives work very differently to USB pen drives); it’s generally manufactured by machines in a factory.
As for the powers of two? Well, the easiest way to hold a number an an electronic circuit is to have a wire; if there is a charge in that wire, it’s a 1, and if there isn’t a charge, it’s a 0. Only having two numbers is pretty useless, so we add in more wires; with two wires, we can have four numbers, with three wires we can have eight numbers, and so on. You will notice that the number of numbers is always a power of two; so if you have a number of a certain size in a computer, it can hold any number *up to* a given power of two. Now, the amount of storage in any storage device must have addresses; and the size of the number that holds the address therefore allows am amount of space up to a power of two to be addressed. Drive manufacturers then ensure that every space that can be addressed is valid readable and writable memory; that’s why it’s always in powers of two.
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