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Some stupid meme my sister showed me went along the lines of "will my laptop get heavier if I put more files in it?", but it was sufficient to get me thinking--is there an energy change & associated mass change when a file is written to a solid state drive?

I don't know enough about how a solid state drive works to know for sure... but my intuition says that for highly compressed files, the informational entropy is probably the same as an unwritten (sector? Again, I don't know that much about SSDs). However, I wonder if highly organized/low entropy files, such as uncompressed text files or bitmaps, would affect a change in the mass of the drive, one way or another.

neph
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  • I've marked this as a duplicate of a question which focuses on hard drives, but I think the specific technological differences between the types of drives are not really that important. That is, if you understand why the information content of a hard drive affects its weight and why that effect is so tiny, you pretty much already understand why the information content of an SSD would also affect its weight and why that is also a tiny effect. On the other hand, I could perhaps see this question being able to stand on its own with some edits to help distinguish it. – David Z Jun 21 '20 at 01:28
  • Hmm, I'm not sure which edits those would be. Of course, the change in mass is tiny, but what I'm particularly interested is whether there's a statistical difference in the energy stored in a formatted but empty drive and a formatted but full drive. I suspect it being an SSD would make a difference. – neph Jun 21 '20 at 01:43
  • Well, in general when you want to distinguish a potential duplicate question from an original, you can edit to clarify exactly what it is that you're asking that wasn't covered in the original question. Basically, make it clear that you've read the original question, that you understand its scope, and you are asking something which is outside that scope and is not just a trivial consequence of the other question. – David Z Jun 21 '20 at 06:05

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