I think the article is wrong in its core premise. While the electrons get added or removed from the floating gate, the total number of electrons in the SSD chip stays the same. Gates are capacitors, in order to add electrons to one capacitor plate, you have to remove an equal numbers of electrons from the other plate, i. e. from the transistor channel. The net charge of a SSD chip is always zero. Otherwise it would just go bang. <s>2.43×10^-15</s> [my bad 1] 2.67×10^15 electrons is about 300µC - that's a lot of charge to separate macroscopically.<p>Therefore the mass (weight is a different thing, through it is proportional to mass at a given constant gravity potential) of the data on a SSD isn't fundamentally different from a HDD - they both are caused by a change of internal energy without any change in the number of fermions. I'd expect data on SSD to have larger mass change because a charged capacitor always store more energy than a discharged one, while energy of magnetic domains is less directional and depends mostly on the state of neighbor domains - but I'm not sure about this part.<p>[1] Thanks stackghost.
TFA started out seeming well enough written but definitely turned LLM-padded in the middle. And yeah, I think you're right about the actual science.
>2.43×10^-15 electrons<p>I believe TFA reads 2.43×10^-15 kg, not electrons. Unless SSDs are creating new and exciting physics, one can't have less than one electron, as it's an elementary particle.
Reminds me of an old April Fools' prank in German c't magazine. They offered a defragmentation-like tool for HDDs that claimed to distribute 0s and 1s more evenly on the drive to make it run more smoothly and extend its lifespan.
Was expecting Boltzmann and entropy to be involved at some point :(
Yeah, I was motivated to go Wiki diving, where I just learned about the Shannon (unit). <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_(unit)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_(unit)</a><p>Time to replace "I'm zero surprised" with "That's a zero Shannon event"
interesting, I wonder if one can translate this into the amount of data on the drive ? Maybe it does not matter unless one cleared the drive using dd(1).<p>Also would trimming cause a different value even though the data size remains the same ? I would think so, assuming I understand trim.