A Question For The Forum Brainiacs.

[mawnansmiff]

These last few days I've been teaching myself how to condense my still expanding CD collection onto USB pendrives and I have to say I'm rather impressed with my progress thus far.

However, last night whilst listening to some funky guitar tunes by one Bill Frisell, I got to thinking about what I was actually doing which led me to the following question.

Say I got a 1 TB memory stick and weighed it on a super accurate set of scales and it came in at precisely 30.0000001 grams. I then proceed to download a whole pile of random music, text & photo files onto the stick so that every byte, bit, nibble, crumb or whatever was taken up with data, would my pendrive still weigh the same?

I'm not usually a gambler but if pushed, I'd put a shilling on it being the exact same weight as when empty of data..

Would I lose my shilling?

Jay.

 

[Sigmund]

It would weigh the same

A lack of data is still data

 

[AirOne]

Are 0 lighter or heavier than 1?

 

[philobeddoe]

https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/does-a-usb-drive-get-heavier-as-you-store-more-files-on-it

 

[Sparcdude]

Well, if you want to get pendantic about it, no weight change can take place as the mass doesn’t change (mass and weight are not the same, by the way. Weight is just the amount of force applied to a mass). It’s a closed system and all you’re doing is changing the characteristics of the storage elements. You’re not adding anything nor are you taking anything away.

All you’re doing, as we say in the biz, is “twiddling the bits”.

ETA: Let’s not get into excessive heat causing the surrounding plastic to gas off, which would technically change the weight.

I just retired from all this kind of stuff. I really need to give it a rest!

 

[brian64]

It depends mostly on whether you're planning to transfer your collection of Lizzo CD's onto it.

 

[Servant King]

Lizzo

That name must not be mentioned on here ever again. Under penalty of forced listening to Lizzo...ugh, dammit, I said it, didn't I?!?

 

[Briarcutter]

I came up with the answer without having a college degree, does that make me smarter, or heavier

 

[renfield]

It depends on how much heavy metal is in your collection.

 

[LOREN]

Interesting

 

[Philosophical Smoke]

1x0=0

Now your brain weighs more brother.

 

[Briar Lee]

It might weigh 21 grams more.

21 grams experiment - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org