Comment by STARGA

The premise has a subtle error. NAND flash stores data by trapping electrons on floating gates, but those electrons come from the substrate — they are not created. The total electron count in the chip stays constant. What changes is the charge distribution across gates.

If anything, the energy stored in the electric fields of charged floating gates contributes a tiny amount of mass via E=mc², but this is orders of magnitude below the article's estimate and would apply to any capacitor, not just SSDs.

The more interesting physical question is whether the information itself has a thermodynamic weight. Landauer's principle says erasing one bit dissipates at least kT ln(2) of energy. By mass-energy equivalence, storing N bits in a maximally efficient reversible memory would have a mass contribution proportional to the information entropy. But this is around 10^-38 kg per bit — unmeasurable with any current technology.