ionhrn t1_ixuz4tp wrote on November 26, 2022 at 4:05 PM

Reply to comment by mrg1957 in ELI5: what exactly is data? What is information? Do they represent anything physical/take up space? by Azooz321

You’re not physically consuming data. You’re thinking of it in the way people "consume" media. If you watch YouTube videos, data is sent to your device and is interpreted. It’s stored temporarily and will not be consumed in any way. Data stored on your hard drive uses magnetism to alter the surface of plates coated in a special material. Then an arm reads the surface of those plates, which also spins, and interprets that data to binary, so that it can be used by other hardware components.

mrg1957 t1_ixuzmnq wrote on November 26, 2022 at 4:09 PM

Nobody physically consumes data. Machines manipulate and read it. As far as hard drives well most is SSD today not a spinning HDD.

ionhrn t1_ixw6vnt wrote on November 26, 2022 at 9:18 PM

No, most is still spinning disks. The cost to storage space is still in favor of hard disk drives. SSD is a more stable storage medium, and a lot of data centers are upgrading to that, But spinning disks still takes the cake