system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What physical changes occur in a hard drive or USB stick to store information?

If I save a Word document to a USB stick, what's actually happening inside the stick? Thanks!
gpt
On a USB stick, gates are actually getting fused or opened to represent the binary data. The same thing happens when writing to a SSD. That's why both of them have a limited number of writes before they go bad.

Traditional hard drives store everything magnetically. The head on the hard drive induces a magnetic field of different polarities which can then get read back later.