Is there anything in common between number systems and a read head? (sic)

Question

Number systems

There was a dispute with the teacher.
She is a grandmother, as they say about such people, "God's dandelion", I don't know what genius put her in the place of a teacher of Computer Architecture.) The shortage is visible.
I asked to make a presentation on the topic "number systems", it would seem that it's time to spit, BUT, with one clarification: a slide about a reading head is required. As I understand it, she meant the magnetic head in the hard drive.
I protested that things are different, they have nothing in common, and if you just shove a slide about this head into the presentation, then linking it to the previous and subsequent slides will not work, and it will be like pasta in borscht (perhaps, it should be clarified that I love making presentations, and I take both the external design and the internal content quite seriously, especially since she asked me to make this particular one in order to show it in lectures for subsequent courses, if not for these factors, I would have succumbed to it easily) .
She could not prove the opposite to me, but she continued to insist on her own and did not refuse her idea.
But now time has passed, I was plunged into doubts, but am I really right?
What do you think? Do they have something in common or not? Preferably with arguments =)
Thank you.

Answer 1

If it is about the reading head - then why immediately HDD? There is also a magnetic tape, and in any CD / DVD-ROM there is a reading head.
It is difficult to say something specific, but the number system in which the information is stored in some way determines the format of the head. For example, for a binary system, it is enough to recognize whether there is a signal or not. For the ternary, this will no longer work - you need three signal levels (there is a signal, the signal is half, there is no signal), which complicates the design of the reading head. Logically, the higher the bit depth of the calculation system in which information is stored, the more accurate the head should be (the more sensitive?). Plus, probably in the case of optical systems, a different recording format is generally required - I'm not sure that it is possible to adequately determine the depth of the dimple on the disk by reflection.
Another assumption is head shifts when passing through "bytes", which will also have different sizes depending on the number system.