• Question: How can you store so much information on a small memory stick? Also, does the size of a memory stick have any affect on the physical memory space?

    Asked by jamesat79 to Christina on 28 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 28 Jun 2013:


      Memory sticks are made up of lots of tiny electric circuits each of which has two transistors. How the transistors are linked determines whether the chip is in an on position (a one) or an off position (a zero) – this means you can use the chips to store binary information (information that’s all 0s and 1s). Everything stored on your computer is fundamentally stored as binary information and so you can transfer information from your computer onto the memory stick.

      The reason they’ve got smaller and smaller is that we’re making smaller and smaller transistors – now at the nanoscale! they’re looking in the future to store the binary information in sheets only an atom thick!!

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