Imagine that we were trying to reverse engineer a computer without knowing anything about it (the “black box” approach). We might start by placing arrays of magnetic sensors around the device. We would notice that during operations that updated a database, significant activity was taking place in a particular circuit board. We would be likely to take note that there was also action in the hard disk during these operations. (Indeed, listening to the hard disk has always been one crude window into what a computer is doing.)
