this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Yeah I was alive long enough to have had a 5 1/4 floppy disk drive. In fact two of them, which made it more convenient to play Sid Meir's Pirates of of the Caribbean. Save on one disk drive, load game data from the other. Elite level gaming rig for the 80s.
And yeah, I also found it confusing that 3 1/2 floppies being called floppy disks. At least until I had a disk go bad and took one apart. Yup, floppy disk inside the protective case.
SSD are still a thing? They're basically standard for a PC nowadays. Are you talking about hybrid drives which were a combo of a SSD and an HDD?
Anyway, why are they called SSD instead of HDD? Solid State Drive as opposed Hard Disk Drive. No disk in the name because the device doesn't use disks. So it's neither a hard or floppy disk drive as the name indicates. I suppose you might split hairs over them being called a drive, since there's no moving parts to actually be driven, but at this point drive is just a commonly used name for storage devices. Like "footage" being used for video that's not on film.
But anyway I think you're trying to prove that the name floppy was a bad name to describe a 3 1/5" floppy disk, despite the fact that the actual disk that the data was saved on was indeed floppy, only the protective case wasn't. Maybe nowadays the protective case would be considered more relevant by a marketing department, but back in those days actual engineers named things. To an engineer, the actual disk that data was saved on is more important than the protective case the disk is contained within.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying about SSDs. SSDs are not considered "Hard Drives" any more, colloquially a hard drive now specifically means platter disks, and therefore SSDs are not hard drives. I very much disagree with it, but that's how language evolved. To me, they are hard drives, because they're still hard storage media, but the general consensus is that all hard drives have disk platters.
I'm not trying to prove that it was a bad name for 3 1/4" floppies, just that the name came from the casing, not the disk medium, and carried forward colloquially because they weren't very different from their floppy predecessors