Q: Does downloading data to a hard drive, say an app onto a phone, make the hard drive slightly heavier? (Question sent via Quora)
A: On a flash hard drive or in RAM? Yes!
Adding information — a 1, instead of a 0 — requires storing an electric charge. Each electron has a very small weight (something like 9.10938215 × 10−31 kg) so adding electrons does mean adding a tiny amount of weight.
How much weight? To get a real-world answer, you have to make assumptions about how many electrons constitute a charge-state in flash memory, but one calculation says that 1GB of flash memory completely filled with 1s weighs something like 729 femtograms more than the same memory filled with zeros.
A femtogram is tiny: 0.000000000000000001 kg.
Some example calculations are midway through this thread: How much does a gigabyte worth of data physically weigh on a hard disk?
And if your question really referred to magnetic drives, then the answer’s no: flipping a magnetic domain shouldn’t change the weight of the drive.
Either way, don’t worry: you won’t notice any extra weight from all those 1s. 🙂
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Hey, the presence of a positive charge imparts the coveted state of ‘1,’ revealing that ‘1’ signifies the absence of electrons rather than their presence. I think this insight might warrant some adjustments to your blog.