Why is it that I’m able to carry my phone around perfectly fine but I’m not supposed to move a hard drive while it’s spinning?
In: Technology
If you’ve ever had a bicycle wheel spin in your hands and you try to twist it, you can feel the wheel not want to.
Now put that into a thin (in these cases flexible) metal disk, with a metal point a few micrometers (less than human hair thickness) and you can probably imagine what is likely to happened..
Disk flexes, point contacts disk. Best case it scratches the disk and removes some data.
Worst case, disk shatters and removes all data.
Solid state disks are all digital, no moving parts. So inertia and spinning forces make no difference
Phones don’t contain spinning disks.
Hard disks store data on very rapidly rotating metal plates. Moving a running hard drive leads to the disks not wanting to move the same way since they act as gyroscopes, which leads to Problems.
Solid state drives, SD cards, flash drives, and the flash memory in phones use solid state memory so they don’t have that issue. However, solid state memory is more expensive than hard drives for large amounts of space.
Basically for the same reason that moving a record player while it’s working is a bad idea. Because your phone uses a form of memory without moving parts.
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