Oldest hard drives I've dealt with were 4RU. Those systems also had me attaching reels of tape with write enable rings.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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It'd be gnar if the smallest one was also a magnetic platter hard drive.
The smallest old style hard drive I can think of is the iPod. But now I want to know if any magnetic platter drives got smaller than that... π€
Afaik, it's all been solid state after that. Even newer iPods.
gnar
You made me think of GWAR
Gwar is pretty gnar.
Oh wow. I didn't even know that was a platter drive! I'm kinda glad I kept that thing.
As far as I'm aware 1.8" is the smallest form factor for mechanical hard drives.
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It really is amazing, and just popping an m.2 into a motherboard directly is just so... easy. And I think Gen5s are what, 2.5x faster than what you're showing here?
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Itβs a bit misleading, you could have used an sd card long ago
I think I have two I could put on the left side. A "full-height" 5.25 inch drive with 5 megabytes and a DEC removable disk platter assembly, somewhere over a foot in diameter and 8 to 10 inches high. I don't remember how much capacity that had. It was for a RP04 or RP06 drive.
You could go back further to the drives mini computers used to use, which basically for in a file cabinet. Or old mainframes, which were the file cabinet.
what's the one on the right?
WD_Black SN770M. There are 1/2, 1, and 2tb models I have the 1tb version here. https://www.newegg.com/western-digital-1tb-sn770m/p/N82E16820250263
It's an M.2 NVMe or sata drive.
I started on 3.5" HDDs in the 90s. I am running 3.5" HDDs today. They are still the most cost efficient.
Do manufacturers use the extra space for larger batteries, or just to make the product smaller overall?
This is for desktop PC. But the correct answer is overall smaller because if you only had spinny drives a lot of small devices wouldn't be possible.
Yes.
Having grown up along with the computer industry, sometimes I have that surreal sense of awe when I remember where we came from and what I used to consider cutting edge. Just upgraded my computer with a few SSDs, one an M.2, and before I put it in I was looking at it and trying to come to grasp with the scale of things (size and speed) vs. my first C-64 computer and Datasette. I know the numbers...they don't convey the difference in the head.
And it will continue...
Soon we'll have 100TB "drives" the size of a thumb nail for 50β¬.
We'll all (we geeks anyways) walk around with the Wikipedia, all Star Trek movies and so on in our pocket :-)
The 1TB and up microSD cards blow my mind.
And they all last until about the same date