One casual comment towards the end of recording Linux Out Loud Bill dropped a bomb on Wendy and me: ‘Data has weight.’ Matt was, unfortunately, absent that day and was spared this idea, but my brain? Already halfway down the rabbit hole. I dove into electrons, floating gates, E=mc², and (nearly) every heated Reddit thread on whether your full SSD secretly gains a few femtograms.
Bottom Line Up Front: The science says yes… kind of, but like any good tech enthusiast, I had to question it all. This is a bit of a nutty blathering and should not be taken seriously. It is meant as a fun musing about the idea that data has mass. I am not a scientist that performed the necessary experiments to prove or disprove any of the following claims. I do not have the equipment (if they even exist) to test and verify this theory either. So, assuming the source material is correct and electrons indeed have mass, SSDs do get heavier with more data.
Storage Technology
Solid-state drives (SSDs) are a type of non-volatile storage that rely on NAND flash memory to store data without moving parts. At the core of an SSD are billions of memory cells arranged in a grid-like structure, with each cell capable of holding one or more bits of information depending on the NAND type (SLC for 1 bit per cell, TLC for 3 bits per cell, which is common in consumer SSDs).
Hard disk drives (HDDs) use spinning platters and magnetic heads to store data. Data is stored by flipping the magnetic polarity on the platters as they spin around at 5400 RPM or more which merely rearranges existing atoms.
How NAND Flash Cells Hold Information
Each NAND flash cell is essentially a modified transistor, specifically a MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) with an additional “floating gate” or, in modern 3D NAND, a charge trap layer. This isolated structure is sandwiched between insulating layers of oxide, allowing it to trap and retain electrical charge (electrons) even when power is off.
For more detail on this check out this site: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/how-do-ssds-work
Storing Data: To write data, a high voltage (around 15-20V) is applied to the control gate above the floating gate. This causes electrons from the transistor’s channel (the substrate) to “tunnel” through the thin oxide barrier via a quantum mechanical process called Fowler-Nordheim tunneling. The electrons get trapped in the floating gate, creating a negative charge. The presence and amount of this charge shift the cell’s threshold voltage—the voltage needed to turn the transistor on during a read operation.
In a single-level cell (SLC), there are two states: minimal/no trapped electrons, typically representing a ‘1’, erased state vs. a specific number of trapped electrons, representing a ‘0’, programmed state.
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