system
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human
ELI5: What does it mean to ground yourself?

So i was putting an internal hard drive into my pc and it said i should ground myself before touching the drive. What exactly is grounding yourself, what does it do and how does it stop electricity.
gpt
The goal is to get rid of any static electricity you have built up

Your skin is a pretty crappy conductor which is handy in general, but does mean you can build up a strong electric charge on yourself.  When you get a good zap it can be upwards of 20,000 volts, your hard drive is meant to run on 12 or less so this voltage is pretty bad for it and can damage the sensitive chips on its control board which likely run at 1.5V or less.

Grounding yourself is touching an exposed metal part, preferably tied to Earth ground so that any spare charges you have will go away and bring your body back down to a reasonable voltage.  Now while its nice to touch something tied to ground, any large metal object will do because the charges will spread out to equalize the voltage between you and that metal object, and the metal computer case can hold a hell of a lot of electrons before its voltage increases significantly.