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Posted on August 24th, 2009 by Tim Danton
The bizarrest email I’ve ever received
I was having quite a bad day, if I’m honest, but then this dropped into my inbox:
Hiya – This is a slightly odd question, but I’m hoping you may be able to help me…
Can you tell me whether a full computer hardrive weighs more than an empty one ? And if it does what does the extra weight comprise of?
Again, I know it’s a strange question, but I would be v grateful if you could shed some light!
Names and email addresses removed to protect the innocent, needless to say.
But it does raise the important question of whether spreadsheets are, metaphorically speaking, heavier than word-processing documents. Are TIFFs heavier than JPEGs? Is Windows heavier than Linux?
Answers on a postcard. And if anyone’s received a stranger email than that, I’d love to hear about it.
Tags: email, hard disks
Posted in: Random
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19 Responses to “ The bizarrest email I’ve ever received ”
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August 24th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Makes me think of Dr. Duncan MacDougall who claimed the weight of the soul was 21g and the film of the same name (which I haven’t seen).
August 24th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I got an email on Friday just after 5pm asking me to do something.
Just what were they thinking!!
August 24th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Your question was actually then posted on SuperUser.com and got an answer (see the duplicate question link on the link below).
http://superuser.com/questions/28823/can-you-tell-me-whether-a-full-computer-hardrive-weighs-more-than-an-empty-one-a
August 24th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Heavier, due to the accumulation of oils from skin from handling.
August 24th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Lighter (by about 1%), if you moved it from the UK to India. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1668872.stm)
August 24th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Lighter. Or heavier. It depends if the tide is in or out. (http://www.agu.org/revgeophys/nerem01/node5.html)
August 24th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Oh yeah. I received an e-mail saying:
(sent to a distribution list)
The guy sitting at the appartment’s computer, please connect the network cable.
Which raises the question: if the network is disconnected, how are they supposed to see the e-mail?
August 24th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
I remember in solid state physics that holes had an ‘effective mass’.
So maybe the question is not so odd.
For the hard drive, it is the ‘orientation of magnetic domains’ that determine the data so ‘nothing is added or removed’, just ’shuffled around a bit’. (As an analogy, a dinner service does not change its weight just because you ’stack it differently’).
August 24th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Varying magnetic domains, on the disks, are very unlikely to affect the actual weight of the drive; even if it did, varying gravitational fields (tides, etc), and varying motor forces would probably drown out any effects.
August 24th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
I would think that physically speaking an ‘empty’ drive still contains the same amount of magnetic information as a ‘full’ hard drive – the only difference being that data ; being an ordered sequence of digits magnetically on the hard disk differs only in sequence rather than weight. A cd is the same weight written or unwritten – although cds are optical media – surely the initial blank mass can not be increased – simply rearranged into data!
August 24th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
I agree that nothing should be added or taken away by adding data to the drive. However, if it is even remotely possible that adding data affects the magnetic field of the drive, then any difference (however small) may have an effect on the drive’s interaction with the earth’s magnetic field.
putting it another way, the drive’s mass is almost certainly constant regardless of data loading, but as weight is a measure of gravity’s effect on a mass, then maybe just maybe a very tiny weight difference may occur. I’m speaking purely hypothetically though.
think of it like this, if you stand in a lift that is going down, you weigh less than if it was stationary but your mass remains constant.
i would like to say that there is no difference between empty and full hard drives, but i’ve seen so much crazy stuff on discovery channel lately that i’m open to the possibility.
August 25th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Notice how nobody is taking about their weirdest emails? I think we need a few more rules to make this really work. No Spam mails; no links to frat-house “man, that’s sick” photo-galleries; it has to be part of a real conversation. I am tempted to further limit the field by suggesting that friends or contacts who go a bit David Icke should also be excluded, just to up the ante a bit… to fit those constraints, I once got a mail asking if I could write a program to virtually sort gold bars int othe most cost-efficient shipment sizes, because the bloke who did it with a blackboard and a big weighing machine had pulled a muscle in his shoulder, and the deliveries were stacking up…
August 25th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
[...] The bizarrest email I’ve ever received | PC Pro blog http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/08/24/the-bizarrest-email-ive-ever-received – view page – cached I was having quite a bad day, if I’m honest, but then this dropped into my inbox: Hiya – This is a slightly odd question, but I’m hoping you may be able to — From the page [...]
August 25th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Information has to be massless – otherwise it cannot travel at lightspeed. However, Government information definitely has mass, which is why they lose it quite frequently – it falls off the cables under the influence of gravity!!
August 26th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
[...] heavy is your data? PC Pro received a funny question: just how heavy is the data on your disk [...]
August 27th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Hi Tim
Re. Your Blog. Everyone knows a full hard drive is heavier than an empty one – it contains many more BITS.
All the best, I’m back to the sanatorium now.
Peter
Peter J S Ashley
Computer Engineer and keen PC Pro Reader/Subscriber with a questionable sense of humour
August 30th, 2009 at 11:19 am
This reminds me of a little old lady I overheard at a vegetable stall in Guildford market in the 70’s.
“4 lbs of potatoes, please. And can you choose small ones for me ‘cos I’ve got to carry them up the hill”
August 31st, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Surely a written CD-R is LIGHTER than a blank one, if the laser cuts grooves into the media in order to record data?
In the same way a carved stone tablet ought to be lighter than a blank one?
August 31st, 2009 at 11:12 pm
A hard drive, will be (theoretically) heavier when it is in a more energetic state. So if one of the states is more energetic the drive will weigh more, according to (a corrected form of) E = mc^2.
can’t be sure: unless something actually evaporates or is physically removed, a written CD would be the same mass. I think it just alters the surface (chemically?) so that it reflects differently.