When it comes to the game of Minecraft, it is more of a case of either you get it, or you don’t. Those who fall into the latter category would be scratching at their heads, wondering just how one is able to spend hours on end in the world of Minecraft without really doing much, other than sniping skeletons, or perhaps hunt around for that additional diamond ore block – or so it seems on the surface. Who knows, one could actually be developing a complex piece of machinery in the game itself, such as this functional hard drive?
Yes sir, someone actually decided to roll up his sleeves and get to work on an actual working hard drive within the confines of an unmodified Minecraft world. Imgur user smellytring is the one behind this unique virtual construction, and it will be powered by redstone, which is similar to the basic sliding doors as well as traps that majority of Minecraft players work with. And since hard drives are meant to store data, this functioning hard drive will do the same, too, in binary to boot.
How does it work? The drive mechanism will push opaque blocks to the front of the redstone circuitry whenever a “1” has to be transmitted, while a clear block is slid back into place so that a “0” can be transmitted. Reading and writing data requires a player to head on to the correct wall-mounted controls, before a bunch of switches are toggled. The total amount of storage space? 1KB, with throughput rated at 1 byte per 8 redstone ticks. In other words, it takes approximately 13 minutes of real world time to fill up the whole hard drive, without taking into account all that time required to convert your data to binary, in addition to setting the switches in-game.
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