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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Speaking as someone who grew up in the 1980s...
Micro-SD cards almost don't make sense to me. I'm not saying I don't believe in them, because of course I have a few of them. Obviously they exist and they work. But. They're the size of a fingernail and can hold billions of characters of data. I uwve a camera that ive put a 128 GB microSD card in. A quick tap on the calculator tells me that's over 91,000 3.5" floppy disks. Assuming they're 3mm thick, that's a stack of disks 273 meters tall. But this card is so tiny that I have to be careful not to lose it.
It gets better. The size of the SD card isn't the storage area. Look carefully at the back of an SD card and you should see how a tiny square area in the middle is a bit 'thicker' than the rest; that's the actual chip, that tiny bump!
SD cards make sense to me. Hard Drives... Now there is some spooky technology.
The reader head on a hard drive changes direction so fast, that it experiences accelerations like that of a bullet being fired, hundreds of times a second.
The "Fly height" or distance a reader floats above the platter is so tiny, that it would crash into a thumbprint.
The actual magnetic media that stores your data is a layer of iron a few atoms thick deposited on to a ceramic or glass platter, with a single atom layer of a protective metal coating (typically rhodium) in top of it.
Despite these incredible tolerances, they damn things are dirt cheap, and surprisingly reliable.