Why are Hard Drives called "Drives"?
12 July 2024 · 4 min read
Punch cards are named quite literally. They are cards with holes punched into them. Floppy disks make sense. They're floppy and shaped like a disk1. So do CDs - compact discs2. Magnetic tapes are plastic tapes that have been coated with a magnetic substance to store data. But what are hard drives?...
Well the obvious and straightforward answer is that hard drives are short for "hard disk drives" which pretty clearly states that they're disks. The drive part is referring to the mechanical component that spins the platter and "drives" data access and storage.
But that brings up another question: Why aren't floppy disks and CDs called drives? Well unlike hard drives, floppy disks and CDs don't include the mechanical interface that reads the data. So there is no "drive" on the disc. The drive is what you insert the discs into.
And lastly why are SSDs called drives despite not having any mechanical components? The simple answer is that it's an anachronism from the era when drives needed to be differentiated from other storage mediums and readers (like punch card readers). The name stuck around to refer to all forms of storage - USB drives, ZIP drives, and now even Google Drive and OneDrive.
The deeper question is why any language - words, icons, symbols, etc. - have meaning. Just like how the save icon looks3 like a floppy disk and file/folder icons look like their paper counterparts. Or how we still say we're "dialing" a phone even though we don't need to spin a rotary dial. Or how carbon copying an email uses neither carbon nor creates a copy of the contents. I could go on.
And I will. Most watches today are used for fitness tracking more than for telling the time4. And the new generations use phones for everything besides calling each other. What will the glasses, clothes, wallets, backpacks, and other accessories of the future look like? Will our digital avatars try replicating the clothes of today and inadvertently look nothing like the actual people of the future.
We already see a lot of companies blurring the lines between soft and hard deleting data. Will it even be possible to permanently delete data in the future? Similarly, as networking speeds continue to increase, the line between online and local will be blurred as well. I can imagine a future where a lot of devices no longer have drives. "Downloading" a file just copies a pointer to the actual location stored somewhere in the cloud.
It makes me wonder what other anachronisms of the 21st century will stick around? And which ones will be phased out.
Footnotes
- The newer floppy disks are smaller and stored in a hard plastic case but the original 8-inch floppy disks were encased in a bendable plastic cover, hence the name. ↩
- You may have noticed the difference in spelling between floppy disK and compact disC. That's because floppy disks were invented in America whereas CDs were developed by Phillips and Sony - European and Japanese companies - which prefered to used the British spelling. And the names stuck. ↩
- More like looked. Nowadays with most people storing data in the cloud, saving is obsolete and the icon that represents whether something is saved is usually just a simple check mark or completely absent. Instead, you see a warning when you're offline and data isn't saved. Saving is the default. ↩
- Why are watches even called that? The word "watch" doesn't seem to have anything to do with time. But that's a sidetrack for another time. ↩
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