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
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.
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