Solved Hard disk drive weight

So, I was just wondering, will there be any physical weight difference between 2 hard drives that are the same model, but one of them is full of data and the other one is completely empty?

Emoclaw said:

So, I was just wondering, will there be any physical weight difference between 2 hard drives that are the same model, but one of them is full of data and the other one is completely empty?

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Nope, because the data on the drive has no physical mass. It's just a bunch of 1s and 0s. I don't remember exactly how the data is stored, but I think that it's all electro-magnetically "printed" even though the surface of the disc in the hard drive is never physically touched.

Edit: This reminds me of a site that I kind of forgot about: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/hard-disk.htm I might go check this out myself because like I said, I'm having a hard time remembering the specifics!

I answer with a question: When you write data to HDD, do you add something concrete with its own physical mass to it?

Answer to both questions is no. The only difference in weight between two identical hard disks, one sealed in factory and weighed a minute after it was produced and the other on your computer full with data is the dust your HD has collected.

Kari