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   Fabian Giesen (rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 19-May-2025 17:51:34 JST Fabian Giesen

   I've been around _just_ long enough to get pretty much the entire history of the etymology of computer storage device names to get hella confusing

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     Fabian Giesen (rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 19-May-2025 17:51:29 JST Fabian Giesen

     in reply to

     in short, two of the three words in "solid-state drive" refer to the thing it's got in common with literally all the other competing storage technologies and the remaining word describes the one thing it doesn't actually do, definitionally

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     Fabian Giesen (rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 19-May-2025 17:51:30 JST Fabian Giesen

     in reply to

     and then we got solid-state storage and the entire terminology is just terminally bonkers now

     we have "disks" that are neither diskettes nor disc-shaped (the actual chips are rectangular), "disk drives" that don't interact with dis[ck]s and don't drive anything (not in a mechanical sense anyway), and the "solid-state" part refers to no moving parts but of course the stuff with moving parts is also all in a solid state of matter, generally

     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ repeated this.
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     Fabian Giesen (rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 19-May-2025 17:51:32 JST Fabian Giesen

     in reply to

     So a 3.5" floppy drive is actually a drive for a disk in a 3.5" hard shell but whatever.

     Then we got other magnetic removable storage formats that were also all hard-shelled but whatever.

     Then audio CDs got adapted for data storage and we got CD-ROMs with CDs (and later DVDs) that were actually disc-shaped, unlike floppies where the actual storage medium was disc-shaped but the overall package wasn't.

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     Fabian Giesen (rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 19-May-2025 17:51:33 JST Fabian Giesen

     in reply to

     When I was a small kid, floppy disks were actually floppy (5.25") and contained actual spinning disks, floppy disk drives contained the thing that drove the disks (i.e. the motor), and hard disk drives had hard disks (metal platters) and the thing that drove them all in one package. Fair enough.

     Not long after, we got 3.5" floppies that had a hard plastic shell and were not actually floppy anymore. Still called them floppies.