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
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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