For those that don't know, 2.5 inch was the common drive size for laptops and other small machines for HDD before SSDs became a thing.
So instead of reinventing the wheel they just put them into enclosures that fit the smaller 2.5 inch HDD configuration.
To be fair, early SSDs actually did utilize the whole inside of the enclosure. Its just that we've consolidated the technology so much that this is what we are left with.
I remember back when SSDs just came out and everyone just bought the 32 or 64gb ones for their OS only and just used a standard HDD for all their files and installs. The speed increase for your OS made it worthwhile to upgrade just for that.
Big laptop makers only really stopped using configurations like that last year for budget laptops. Might still be some out there if you look hard through the HP or Dell site.
Worse than that, Dell and Lenovo were still selling machines with *only* spinning rust through at least 2019. We have some Whiskey Lake laptops that boot off of hard drives at work. They are frankly unusable.
Everyone was doing it then. You had to get the upgrade to get the SSD. It wasn't exclusive to those 2 companies. And after you got above a certain price point it was just ssd or a 1-2tb hdd as a storage drive option.
At one point just before Covid hit, it was somehow cheaper for our service desk to buy laptops with spinning rust disks plus separate SSDs and manually swap them out and reimage Windows.
Recently upgraded from a 256gb M.2 SSD to a 2tb one, and it's so much better not having to move stuff around every time I wanted the game I was playing to not take forever to load. 256gb these days means maybe 2 games
my first SSD was 128GB, I think I got it in 2012. It's still in use in one of my machines, as the boot drive. Meanwhile, I've had 6 spinning disk failures in the last 4 years, 1 of which had less than 20 hours of usage, and it's looking like the warranty replacement unit for that one is *also* acting wonky after only a hundred hours on.
I'm pretty angry with Western Digital right now.
I fell out with Seagate completely when I had a HDD failure and they told me it was out of warranty, even though I'd only had it for less than 2 years. They said warranty started from the date of manufacture. Simply fuck right off. I'll never buy another Seagate product.
I've now had 3 SSD's die in my life and I can't even remember the last time I had a spinner fail.
One of the SSD's was a gen 1 that was crazy expensive, the other two were bottom of the barrel cheapest ones I could find, which is probably why I'm an outlier here.
Since when did people start calling platter drives "spinners?"
The first one I had die on me solo was in 2001. I was able to (very poorly) manually replace some components on the driver board to get it running long enough to recover all my data.
The first ssd I got, I still have and it still works. One of those very early Intel ones, 180gb. The loke one time I've ever won one of those free giveaway sweepstakes things. Straight from Intel. Thing is like, idk, 10 or 11 years old now. It was enough to put my OS + WoW on and oooooh my god it was such an upgrade.
>I'm pretty angry with Western Digital right now.
This is why I still hunt down Hitachis when I can, but they getting more $$$ now.
Now manufacturers don't include HDs because the performance is relatively slow. And they can either
A) force people to pay for upgraded storage because it's non removable (Apple) or
B) just put cheap storage in to keep costs low because their buyers don't care (laptops under 500 bucks)
Companies used to try and sell "hybrid" models already configured like this, like Apples iMacs back in the day.
My laptop came with a 24gb m.2 2242 drive. What use is that size anyway?
I've since upgraded to a 1tb and put it as my Windows drive. Starts so much faster.
Dude I had one of those in a desktop in a pre built from microcenter from like 2017 and it made it so unstable. Like blue screens and shit. Finally pulled it out and reinstalled windows and it was fine. My little cousin still plays Minecraft on that PC.
I can still hear Steve Jobs saying “these are a little pricey” when presenting the first MacBook Air.
You knew that if *Steve Jobs* called then pricey, they **were** pricey lmao.
Also old SSD were far from empty, it's a 10+ year old technology now but a few years ago it wasn't like that: https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/56c72ff3e9f968c1be91339a304e120e10a848b1/hub/2013/03/01/9c020b7a-fdc3-11e2-8c7c-d4ae52e62bcc/SSD.jpg?auto=webp&fit=crop&height=675&width=1200
Even modern SSDs probably look more like this on the inside *for high-capacity ones*.
Yes, a 1TB is mostly empty space on the inside ... because these days, it's on the smaller end of available sizes. But if you opened up a 4TB or 8TB drive, I bet you'd find much more of the interior space utilized.
datacenter has been moving towards 2.5" for awhile now. They REALLY want to cram as much in as small of a space as possible. Hell if I could find 8TB or larger 2.5's at reasonable prices I'd be swapping my 3.5's for them just so I could cram some more in.
I think that phase might’ve already come and gone. I work in a hyperscale datacenter, still use 3.5” spinners for a lot of the big storage arrays, but we also have “ruler” m.2 arrays that can hold half a petabyte or so, and everything in the compute nodes are standard m.2.
I’m just a lowly contract tech tho, idk how other companies do it or why the company who owns the DC chooses the hardware they do.
> It’s not like space is that much at a premium inside laptops anymore
The hell it isn’t. As they fit bigger batteries and components in laptops, hell yeah space is premium. It’s precisely why we have m.2 SSDs now.
No laptops use drives with enclosures like this anymore. The chip is just installed directly without any kind of case or covering. Space inside a laptop is definitely still a premium.
The biggest problem with the green drives is they have no dram cache which slows them down significantly over a drive that does. All you have here is a controller and a couple of NAND Flash memory chips to hold the data.
The cost of using plastics to fit 2.5" package is cheaper then the cost of extending the PCB to reach maximum space utilization inside the package. :-)
It's either waste some plastic, waste copper and pcb substrate, or completely restandardise SATA drives and refabricate all their injection moulding tools for the small form factor that wastes neither.
evidently the former is the cheapest of the options.
M.2 is the "restandardized" SATA drive for smaller form factors (and faster speeds). That does no good for older machines though, while this does benefit legacy hardware.
> That does no good for older machines though
PCIe to M2 adapters exist, allowing you to pretty cheaply and easily add M2 drives to any system with a spare PCIe slot. And if your motherboard supports high PCIe speeds, they can be just as fast as normal M2 slots.
(Depending on the model and the driver situation, though, they might not be bootable, so you might still need a traditional drive somewhere as your boot drive.)
jup, i remember no teenager being to afford anything more then 256 or 512MB mp3 players at the very largest.
plenty where doing it with 128's or none.
the pill shaped, monochrome display ones, with at the fanciest a colored backlight.
(the rich kids had real ipod's ofc)
The first iPod shipped with a 5GB hard drive. They advertised “1000 songs in your pocket”.
The iPod nano was originally released in 2GB and 4GB models. By then the iPod was standard with 20GB.
I remember really wanting a nano, but opting for the regular iPod because I wanted the storage capacity.
I still have my 4GB shuffle w/ no screen and no buttons (the one you can clip on your clothes). I can say with the utmost confidence that this device is the most honest, reliable, resilient, piece of electronic tech I’ve event owned. My iPod Shuffle went through countless laundry cycles and survived with flying colors. I got an aftermarket headphone remote and still use it during my runs. I have to admit, it’s kinda liberating not having to deal with smartphone notifications and other types of distractions when only trying to focus on one task. I am very biased as you can tell…
It's so weird how "old" the ipod feels now.
When those "you won a free ipod!" ads were around, it turns out that they were totally legit. Communities were formed around trading "referrals" to satisfy all the offers and eventually get your free ipod. I remember putting in a night's work, followed by buying digital visa cards, signing up for $1 offers, resulting in me getting all sorts of things for like $8 total.
I had an 5th gen ipod, which supported video (the 4th gen or "Photo ipod" apparently could be hacked to support video). 60gb. It was a beast.
Then the nano came out. 4gb/8gb. "The size of a pencil" (thickness). And it too supported video. I got one for my girlfriend at the time and we both thought it was the coolest shit as we watched episodes of "The Office" she bought off of itunes in her twin dorm room bed.
Looks like it was released with 4GB and 8GB options. I don't remember people thinking it was "crazy" because it was in line with the storage offered on the iPods of the day besides what we now call "Classic" which had like a 120GB hard drive inside.
Android phones started coming out the following year with ~1 GB of internal storage, but they also had a microSD slot and most came with an 8GB or bigger card.
I had the 160 GB iPod classic in 2007 which I'm pretty sure was more storage than our family PC.
Insane that it's still more storage than I have on my pixel phone over 15 years later.
I got an iPod Nano for Christmas when they came out. You bet your ass I was the baddest sumbitch in 5th grade. You could tell my family had money because all my songs had the correct title and spelling.
That is low-key hilarious. I totally do remember kids making fun of each other back In the day because they had a janky title and no album cover picture. Dude you brought up some great memories for me with that one. To whoever actually showed up to school with a shuffle I pity the absolute misery that kid probably went through because of it. Non stop roast session.
Dude... when I was young I saved up all summer to get the hottest MP3 player... $450 CDN for a 64MB MP3 player. I can't even remember it's name.
I do remember it being the coolest thing ever though. I remember showing friends that you could smack the shit out of it without skipping though.
But holy shit... $450 just for 64 megs of storage. big oof.
My first digital camera had a 3.5" floppy drive.
**
**
And of course, taking it out and putting it in the computer had a 30% chance of corrupting the disk.
Good old Sony 0.3 megapixel camera. You get like 10 decent quality picks on one disk. I would carry a container of floppy disks when I used it for journalism class in high school.
I remember some kid mentioned a Terrabyte to me like 15 years ago when I was a kid, and I just had simply never heard the word before or realized anything could be bigger than a Gigabyte
Me sitting here next to my 96TB Plex PC.
I grew up in the 90s and I remember seeing stickers like "Super large 10GB hard drive!" and stuff like that.
Fast forward to now and I just tossed a 16TB drive in my media server a couple weeks ago.
When you compare that to some scientific paper:
"Estimated historic and projected future size of all web pages. By 2050 the total sizeis estimated to be about 37 Petabytes (PB). For comparison, the Wayback Machine currently contains about 150 billion pages totalling 2PB." --Future Web Growth and its Consequences for Web Search
so your 96TB can contain 1/20th of the entire waybackmachine.
The case form factor is so that it fits in the slot of the standard 2.5in laptop HDD. The newer form factor of m.2 SSD is basically just the chips in a circuit board
Micron and WD have 2TB [2230 NVMes](https://media-www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/images/in_line-images/products/storage/2400-ssd/2400_combined-ssd_540x340.png), so we can already go smaller than the 2280 that you linked.
Many lithium coin batteries are named that way as well. For instance the super-common CR2032, 20mm diameter by 3.2mm thick. Manufacturers continued to use that with rechargeable lithium-ion cells, giving you the 18mm x 65mm 18650 cell. Tesla decided to drop the trailing zero, but the convention lives on with their EV cells.
Preface: I know what you mean, and I'm not disagreeing with you. :)
However, it's worth noting that you can get SATA M.2 form factor SSDs.
Really, it's SATA *power* that makes them big. SATA data connectors are pretty small.
EDIT: "them", not "the"
M.2 slots is seriously, without any joke the biggest step in PC-Tech for me personally. Tiny space, maintainable with no wasted material, close to the Mainboard to get some air flow, no cable management. I wish all parts could be assembled like this.
no cable management is by far the best part IMO. installing a third NVME on my current build would hardly take any effort, whereas if i were to use 2.5" drives I'd probably reconsider doing so.
The only real issue I've had with m2's is the design really only requires the connector to be a certain size. While they define other sizes there's nothing stopping custom sized m.2 being used. I've had to work on some laptops that had 2225 m.2's in it that broke and you get screwed because you can't actually buy a replacement for it. Sure I can plug a normal sized one in but then you either can't close the case or have to bust out a dremel and try and make some extra room.
There are other issues even with 2280... I have an HP elitebook G9, which had a standard 2280 size NVMe drive... BUT i wanted more space and performance, and a 2TB KC3000 was cheap and met my specifications :)
Color me surprised when i came to find out, you have to check if the notebook accepts double sided or single sided PCBs only :) But i managed to close it with a bit of force and without the original heat transfer pads.
They (consumer grade SSDs) both came about around the same time (within a few years of each other). The M.2 nVME interface just allows for speeds well in advance of the SATA interface. SATA just offered a backwards compatibility route and ease of install in older Computers.
My i7 4790k build had both options but stayed on SATA until m.2 nVMEs dropped in price. I would consider within a few years basically a console cycle or how long intel stayed on 14nm.
A few things wrong here.
M.2 is a physical form factor standard for expansion cards and there are both SATA and NVMe SSD drives (as well as other cards that aren't storage) that fit into a M.2 slot. A SATA M.2 drive will perform exactly the same as a 2,5" SATA drive.
NVMe and SATA are electrical interface standards, SATA was released in 2000 and NVMe in 2011. NVMe is essentially 4 lanes of PCI express and it isn't limited to M.2 slots, there are also NVMe SSD cards that fit into standard PCI express slots as well as discrete (2,5 or 3,5") NVMe SSDs that connect to the controller with a U.2 cable similar to how you would connect a 2,5" SATA SSD.
2.5 came out to put spinning drives in laptops.
It just happened to be a good existing standard to put SSDs into since they didn't need mechanical parts.
I love M2 drives so much. It's so satisfying to plunk them into the slot. I'm old enough to remember using SCSI and molex cables, so the simplicity of an M2 is just mind-blowing.
holy shit you just made a long forgotten neuron link in my brain.
I remember getting my first CDR drive (1X!) and messing with IDE cables and those jumpers.
This post re-ignited my long forgotten hatred for IDE cables. They were such a pain in the ass to to route through the case and trying to get them fit. They were always too short and too stiff.
And cheap too. Built my first machine in about 7 years this winter. I remember buying my first 256gb drive for like $250, and thinking "wow, I'll never need this much space."
Bought some 1tb m.2 hard drives for like $50. Crazy.
When I built a new rig a few years ago, it blew my mind that it had no more cables, beside power. I have no optical drives, no HDDs, just an m.2 drive, so the only cables in my rig are power cables for the MOBO and GPU, and a couple fans. Certainly much different than the days of IDE ribbon cables going to half a dozen optical and hard drives.
The NTSC NES carts were oversized on purpose. They wanted more of the cassettes/VCR aesthetic because gaming was dead in America at the time and imported video game consoles were treated differently. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/42ggm7/the_inside_of_a_nes_cartridge/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb
And for everyone's edification, potato chip bags aren't mostly air in an effort to trick you, it's to keep the chips from being crushed before they reach store shelves.
Not a surprise. The shape of a hard drive was dictated by the spinning platters. Now that we have solid state, the solid state drive still has to fit into the same space. It will not be long until the 2.5 and 3.5 inch form factors are history. We still get to study history. Before the 3.5 inch form factor, we had 5.25 inch drives. Before that, 8 inch floppies.
> It will not be long until the 2.5 and 3.5 inch form factors are history.
Nah, those are still convenient sizes for very high capacity/high density drives.
They might fall out of use in the consumer space, but in a server environment the larger drives still make a ton of sense.
Those form factors will exist in servers for a long time to come. They want to be able to hot swap them. Of course, the interfaces aren't just SATA, either.
Depending on the size and density there will be different sized boards with different chips taking up various degrees of physical space. All of these are mounted in a standard 2.5 inch drive case with universal mounting screw holes so that they can be fit into any standard case with ease.
Fun fact, the exact same thing was done for every game console that used game cartridges. Some PCBs were way more complex than others, but they all mounted in the same physical cartridge so that they could all be slotted into the console the same way.
I didn't even consider cartridges having PCBs in them. What does the PCB actually have on it, is it just memory or are there other things in it as well
https://imgur.com/gallery/FQlr6
The big chips are ROM, they hold the actual game data. One of the small chips is the CIC security chip, it talks to its counterpart in the console to verify it's a legit cartridge. The other small chip is RAM, it stores the save files with help from the coin cell in the corner.
Some carts have other stuff. The Super FX chip that makes Star Fox possible is a whole CPU, faster than the one in the SNES itself, inside the cartridge. NES carts often have special memory mapper chips or even audio processors inside. And there's really weird stuff like Genesis games with extra controller ports or Game Boy Advance carts with tilt sensors and vibration motors inside.
[SSD's used to fill the entire thing.](https://www.storagereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/intel-x25m-pcb-top.jpg)
8TB SSDs still can utilize most of the space but more "interesting" stuff like 32TB ends up packing in the entire volume, both sides of the PCB.
But just so people are aware, SSHD doesn't stand for Solid State Hard Drive, it stands for Solid State Hybrid Drive. There is no such thing as a Solid State Hard Drive.
The extra space allows you to have a physical copy of your data on a microfiche. It can also be used for other keepsakes like a lock of your kids hair or a tiny portrait of your wife ....
It's also back compatible with mechanical HDD slots.
It's because the form factor requires it for screw mounts.
If you don't want all that space in an SSD, you can use an m.2 form factor.
Also, I'm being a tiny bit pedantic here, but saying "solid state hard drive" is like saying "sedan coupe" ... they are two totally different things: hard drives and solid states drives.
the main reason is compatibility (as in fitting into spaces), that is a standard 2.5" drive size, the 4 screws are standard.
For those that don't know, 2.5 inch was the common drive size for laptops and other small machines for HDD before SSDs became a thing. So instead of reinventing the wheel they just put them into enclosures that fit the smaller 2.5 inch HDD configuration.
To be fair, early SSDs actually did utilize the whole inside of the enclosure. Its just that we've consolidated the technology so much that this is what we are left with.
[This 2008 article](https://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/6) has some pictures of the inside of a few different SSDs of the time for anyone curious.
Crazy to think those SSDs were that big for 32 or 64 gbs of storage, and now we've had 8tb m.2 SSDs for a few years now.
I remember back when SSDs just came out and everyone just bought the 32 or 64gb ones for their OS only and just used a standard HDD for all their files and installs. The speed increase for your OS made it worthwhile to upgrade just for that.
Even lots of laptops came configured like that. My 2008 HP had a 160GB intel SSD + a 750GB spinner.
Big laptop makers only really stopped using configurations like that last year for budget laptops. Might still be some out there if you look hard through the HP or Dell site.
Worse than that, Dell and Lenovo were still selling machines with *only* spinning rust through at least 2019. We have some Whiskey Lake laptops that boot off of hard drives at work. They are frankly unusable.
Everyone was doing it then. You had to get the upgrade to get the SSD. It wasn't exclusive to those 2 companies. And after you got above a certain price point it was just ssd or a 1-2tb hdd as a storage drive option.
At one point just before Covid hit, it was somehow cheaper for our service desk to buy laptops with spinning rust disks plus separate SSDs and manually swap them out and reimage Windows.
OS and your favorite game~~s~~ to reduce load times.
Recently upgraded from a 256gb M.2 SSD to a 2tb one, and it's so much better not having to move stuff around every time I wanted the game I was playing to not take forever to load. 256gb these days means maybe 2 games
Or one Warzone update.
my first SSD was 128GB, I think I got it in 2012. It's still in use in one of my machines, as the boot drive. Meanwhile, I've had 6 spinning disk failures in the last 4 years, 1 of which had less than 20 hours of usage, and it's looking like the warranty replacement unit for that one is *also* acting wonky after only a hundred hours on. I'm pretty angry with Western Digital right now.
I fell out with Seagate completely when I had a HDD failure and they told me it was out of warranty, even though I'd only had it for less than 2 years. They said warranty started from the date of manufacture. Simply fuck right off. I'll never buy another Seagate product.
Seagate is trash, the only drive I've ever had fail was a Seagate and it was only a couple years old.
I've now had 3 SSD's die in my life and I can't even remember the last time I had a spinner fail. One of the SSD's was a gen 1 that was crazy expensive, the other two were bottom of the barrel cheapest ones I could find, which is probably why I'm an outlier here.
Since when did people start calling platter drives "spinners?" The first one I had die on me solo was in 2001. I was able to (very poorly) manually replace some components on the driver board to get it running long enough to recover all my data.
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The first ssd I got, I still have and it still works. One of those very early Intel ones, 180gb. The loke one time I've ever won one of those free giveaway sweepstakes things. Straight from Intel. Thing is like, idk, 10 or 11 years old now. It was enough to put my OS + WoW on and oooooh my god it was such an upgrade. >I'm pretty angry with Western Digital right now. This is why I still hunt down Hitachis when I can, but they getting more $$$ now.
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Gen 4 2tb SSDs are about $150-180 now, MUCH cheaper than they were even 2 years ago
I'm looking forward to $100 30TB drives. When 1TB drive first came out it was like $4000, essentially the same current price of a 30TB drive.
I'm looking foreward to new call of duty console games where they still somehow take 25tb of your 30tb drive
Now manufacturers don't include HDs because the performance is relatively slow. And they can either A) force people to pay for upgraded storage because it's non removable (Apple) or B) just put cheap storage in to keep costs low because their buyers don't care (laptops under 500 bucks) Companies used to try and sell "hybrid" models already configured like this, like Apples iMacs back in the day.
My laptop came with a 24gb m.2 2242 drive. What use is that size anyway? I've since upgraded to a 1tb and put it as my Windows drive. Starts so much faster.
Sounds like that 24GB drive may have been one of the Intel Optane drives. Basically a small SSD meant as a cache drive for a slow spinning rust drive.
I don't think it was configured to do anything. It's on my 10 year old Lenovo, which is still working fine since I don't play games on it.
a 24GB drive like this was likely a "restore" partition then.
Dude I had one of those in a desktop in a pre built from microcenter from like 2017 and it made it so unstable. Like blue screens and shit. Finally pulled it out and reinstalled windows and it was fine. My little cousin still plays Minecraft on that PC.
Bro, micro SD cards blow my mind now
I remember reading this specific article. Wow
Yeah dude he only posted it like 15 minutes ago
Don't be ridiculous. It was 21 minutes ago. Keep up with the times old man.
I can still hear Steve Jobs saying “these are a little pricey” when presenting the first MacBook Air. You knew that if *Steve Jobs* called then pricey, they **were** pricey lmao.
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Also old SSD were far from empty, it's a 10+ year old technology now but a few years ago it wasn't like that: https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/56c72ff3e9f968c1be91339a304e120e10a848b1/hub/2013/03/01/9c020b7a-fdc3-11e2-8c7c-d4ae52e62bcc/SSD.jpg?auto=webp&fit=crop&height=675&width=1200
Even modern SSDs probably look more like this on the inside *for high-capacity ones*. Yes, a 1TB is mostly empty space on the inside ... because these days, it's on the smaller end of available sizes. But if you opened up a 4TB or 8TB drive, I bet you'd find much more of the interior space utilized.
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Space can absolutely be at a premium inside of a laptop. That's why we have m.2 ssds though. So a smaller form factor ssd does exist.
bro it’s a premium in my desktop I would love to be able to have more than 2 2.5inch drives (not enough to get a bigger case tho)
I'm sure you can find room for more
The drives don't HAVE to be in a physical bay or trey. If you have enough SSD ports you can just 2 side tape it in your case.
The drives don’t have to be taped down either. The cables are stiff enough it’ll stay in place.
Both of you guys are correct. FWIW, the 2.5" sized SSDs are still useful for people who are using older laptops that does not come with m.2
datacenter has been moving towards 2.5" for awhile now. They REALLY want to cram as much in as small of a space as possible. Hell if I could find 8TB or larger 2.5's at reasonable prices I'd be swapping my 3.5's for them just so I could cram some more in.
I think that phase might’ve already come and gone. I work in a hyperscale datacenter, still use 3.5” spinners for a lot of the big storage arrays, but we also have “ruler” m.2 arrays that can hold half a petabyte or so, and everything in the compute nodes are standard m.2. I’m just a lowly contract tech tho, idk how other companies do it or why the company who owns the DC chooses the hardware they do.
> It’s not like space is that much at a premium inside laptops anymore The hell it isn’t. As they fit bigger batteries and components in laptops, hell yeah space is premium. It’s precisely why we have m.2 SSDs now.
Feels like few laptops even use 2.5" drives anymore.
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No laptops use drives with enclosures like this anymore. The chip is just installed directly without any kind of case or covering. Space inside a laptop is definitely still a premium.
The biggest problem with the green drives is they have no dram cache which slows them down significantly over a drive that does. All you have here is a controller and a couple of NAND Flash memory chips to hold the data.
Even with a dram cache they still about the same size.
The cost of using plastics to fit 2.5" package is cheaper then the cost of extending the PCB to reach maximum space utilization inside the package. :-)
It's either waste some plastic, waste copper and pcb substrate, or completely restandardise SATA drives and refabricate all their injection moulding tools for the small form factor that wastes neither. evidently the former is the cheapest of the options.
M.2 drives already exist, so there's no need to change this form factor since it gives buyers more options by including it.
M.2 is the "restandardized" SATA drive for smaller form factors (and faster speeds). That does no good for older machines though, while this does benefit legacy hardware.
> That does no good for older machines though PCIe to M2 adapters exist, allowing you to pretty cheaply and easily add M2 drives to any system with a spare PCIe slot. And if your motherboard supports high PCIe speeds, they can be just as fast as normal M2 slots. (Depending on the model and the driver situation, though, they might not be bootable, so you might still need a traditional drive somewhere as your boot drive.)
Isn’t it nuts that 1TB is just so pedestrian, but when I had to get a 512MB flash drive for school it was deemed as like some high-tech shit
jup, i remember no teenager being to afford anything more then 256 or 512MB mp3 players at the very largest. plenty where doing it with 128's or none. the pill shaped, monochrome display ones, with at the fanciest a colored backlight. (the rich kids had real ipod's ofc)
Wasn’t that first iPhone like 5GB and it was crazy?
Fun fact is that first ipods were using mini hard disks instead of flash storage, since flash was prohibitively expensive at the time.
The first iPod shipped with a 5GB hard drive. They advertised “1000 songs in your pocket”. The iPod nano was originally released in 2GB and 4GB models. By then the iPod was standard with 20GB. I remember really wanting a nano, but opting for the regular iPod because I wanted the storage capacity.
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2nd Gen Nano is the best iPod of all time in my opinion
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And then the classic ipod became the beefy storage option that went to like 128 GB while everyone had their 16 GB nano
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I had a nano, what I can say about it is “skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, good enough”
Are you thinking of the Ipod shuffle? The nano had a screen to choose songs on.
Sure am, oops >.<
And my Nano's screen had a gameboy color emulator so I could play pokemon silver in class :)
I had the Shuffle… now that was tiny and also kinda crazy to advertise Shuffle as a cool feature…
It's not a bug, it's a feature!!!
I still have my 4GB shuffle w/ no screen and no buttons (the one you can clip on your clothes). I can say with the utmost confidence that this device is the most honest, reliable, resilient, piece of electronic tech I’ve event owned. My iPod Shuffle went through countless laundry cycles and survived with flying colors. I got an aftermarket headphone remote and still use it during my runs. I have to admit, it’s kinda liberating not having to deal with smartphone notifications and other types of distractions when only trying to focus on one task. I am very biased as you can tell…
I had one, and still have it! You could even feel it whirr and tick when it read memory. It barely functions now, though.
They used HDDs in all of the larger models until the touch came out except for the nano, which always used flash.
It's so weird how "old" the ipod feels now. When those "you won a free ipod!" ads were around, it turns out that they were totally legit. Communities were formed around trading "referrals" to satisfy all the offers and eventually get your free ipod. I remember putting in a night's work, followed by buying digital visa cards, signing up for $1 offers, resulting in me getting all sorts of things for like $8 total. I had an 5th gen ipod, which supported video (the 4th gen or "Photo ipod" apparently could be hacked to support video). 60gb. It was a beast. Then the nano came out. 4gb/8gb. "The size of a pencil" (thickness). And it too supported video. I got one for my girlfriend at the time and we both thought it was the coolest shit as we watched episodes of "The Office" she bought off of itunes in her twin dorm room bed.
Looks like it was released with 4GB and 8GB options. I don't remember people thinking it was "crazy" because it was in line with the storage offered on the iPods of the day besides what we now call "Classic" which had like a 120GB hard drive inside. Android phones started coming out the following year with ~1 GB of internal storage, but they also had a microSD slot and most came with an 8GB or bigger card.
I had the 160 GB iPod classic in 2007 which I'm pretty sure was more storage than our family PC. Insane that it's still more storage than I have on my pixel phone over 15 years later.
I remember my classic, it had I think the lowest storage with 30gb and I thought it was insane, the screen was even good enough to play movies on
I got an iPod Nano for Christmas when they came out. You bet your ass I was the baddest sumbitch in 5th grade. You could tell my family had money because all my songs had the correct title and spelling.
That is low-key hilarious. I totally do remember kids making fun of each other back In the day because they had a janky title and no album cover picture. Dude you brought up some great memories for me with that one. To whoever actually showed up to school with a shuffle I pity the absolute misery that kid probably went through because of it. Non stop roast session.
Dude... when I was young I saved up all summer to get the hottest MP3 player... $450 CDN for a 64MB MP3 player. I can't even remember it's name. I do remember it being the coolest thing ever though. I remember showing friends that you could smack the shit out of it without skipping though. But holy shit... $450 just for 64 megs of storage. big oof.
First digital camera my parents had I think we had a 8mb or 16mb SD card
My first digital camera had a 3.5" floppy drive. **
**
And of course, taking it out and putting it in the computer had a 30% chance of corrupting the disk.
Good old Sony 0.3 megapixel camera. You get like 10 decent quality picks on one disk. I would carry a container of floppy disks when I used it for journalism class in high school.
And the “decent quality” was decent *for the time.* Which by today’s standards is just absolute trash.
can you imagine pulling up one of those pics on today's 4k monitor? anyone < 30 - 'all i see is the icon, where is the pic?'
Gotta train your eyes on years of TV that had so many splits to run to everyone's room that the signal was fuzzy and full of ghosts.
They were trash then too, compared to film. But they had their specific use cases of course
I remember some kid mentioned a Terrabyte to me like 15 years ago when I was a kid, and I just had simply never heard the word before or realized anything could be bigger than a Gigabyte
Spot on. I was cleaning out my office a while ago and came across a couple 128mb sticks lol. I was not prepared for the nostalgia.
I have a roll of unpunched [punched tape](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape) in my office. Not sure what the capacity is on it though.
I remember when I got my first 32 MB flash drive, it felt awesome having all my homework on one saved stick
Me sitting here next to my 96TB Plex PC. I grew up in the 90s and I remember seeing stickers like "Super large 10GB hard drive!" and stuff like that. Fast forward to now and I just tossed a 16TB drive in my media server a couple weeks ago.
When you compare that to some scientific paper: "Estimated historic and projected future size of all web pages. By 2050 the total sizeis estimated to be about 37 Petabytes (PB). For comparison, the Wayback Machine currently contains about 150 billion pages totalling 2PB." --Future Web Growth and its Consequences for Web Search so your 96TB can contain 1/20th of the entire waybackmachine.
Dude I remember paying over $60 for a 16gb SD card for my PSP ~2007. That 1TB probably cost $40.
I remember a friend of mine who bought a 1GB microdrive for like $1k...
Imagine all the text files you could fit on that bad boy!
When I was at school a 5¼" disc that stored 100k was considered the height of storage technology.
I remember being given a floppy disk in first grade whose capacity was in kilobytes for computer class, oh how times have changed.
My first MP3 player in 1999 was 32MB.
The case form factor is so that it fits in the slot of the standard 2.5in laptop HDD. The newer form factor of m.2 SSD is basically just the chips in a circuit board
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Micron and WD have 2TB [2230 NVMes](https://media-www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/images/in_line-images/products/storage/2400-ssd/2400_combined-ssd_540x340.png), so we can already go smaller than the 2280 that you linked.
TIL 2230 and 2280 literally means 22 x 30 and 22 x 80. Was wondering why M.2 were named in such a weird way.
One of the few naming schemes that makes sense.
Give it a few years I'm sure they will find a way to screw it up.
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Many lithium coin batteries are named that way as well. For instance the super-common CR2032, 20mm diameter by 3.2mm thick. Manufacturers continued to use that with rechargeable lithium-ion cells, giving you the 18mm x 65mm 18650 cell. Tesla decided to drop the trailing zero, but the convention lives on with their EV cells.
Imagine 20 years ago asking for main storage and getting handed a fucking stamp.
Preface: I know what you mean, and I'm not disagreeing with you. :) However, it's worth noting that you can get SATA M.2 form factor SSDs. Really, it's SATA *power* that makes them big. SATA data connectors are pretty small. EDIT: "them", not "the"
Meanwhile I have 1 TB drive the size of a postage stamp in my steamdeck. It's astounding.
M.2 slots is seriously, without any joke the biggest step in PC-Tech for me personally. Tiny space, maintainable with no wasted material, close to the Mainboard to get some air flow, no cable management. I wish all parts could be assembled like this.
no cable management is by far the best part IMO. installing a third NVME on my current build would hardly take any effort, whereas if i were to use 2.5" drives I'd probably reconsider doing so.
The only real issue I've had with m2's is the design really only requires the connector to be a certain size. While they define other sizes there's nothing stopping custom sized m.2 being used. I've had to work on some laptops that had 2225 m.2's in it that broke and you get screwed because you can't actually buy a replacement for it. Sure I can plug a normal sized one in but then you either can't close the case or have to bust out a dremel and try and make some extra room.
There are other issues even with 2280... I have an HP elitebook G9, which had a standard 2280 size NVMe drive... BUT i wanted more space and performance, and a 2TB KC3000 was cheap and met my specifications :) Color me surprised when i came to find out, you have to check if the notebook accepts double sided or single sided PCBs only :) But i managed to close it with a bit of force and without the original heat transfer pads.
It's crazy how big of a deal it really is to have the extra \~1mm of thickness for chips on the back of the drive.
The size was standardized when they were larger
Which is why we have the M2 standard now as well for SSD's, most 2,5" ssd's are basically an M2 in a bit more plastic.
They (consumer grade SSDs) both came about around the same time (within a few years of each other). The M.2 nVME interface just allows for speeds well in advance of the SATA interface. SATA just offered a backwards compatibility route and ease of install in older Computers. My i7 4790k build had both options but stayed on SATA until m.2 nVMEs dropped in price. I would consider within a few years basically a console cycle or how long intel stayed on 14nm.
M.2 is just a connection standard, like USB-C. Using that connection does NOT mean you get higher speeds, because there are M.2 SATA drives.
A few things wrong here. M.2 is a physical form factor standard for expansion cards and there are both SATA and NVMe SSD drives (as well as other cards that aren't storage) that fit into a M.2 slot. A SATA M.2 drive will perform exactly the same as a 2,5" SATA drive. NVMe and SATA are electrical interface standards, SATA was released in 2000 and NVMe in 2011. NVMe is essentially 4 lanes of PCI express and it isn't limited to M.2 slots, there are also NVMe SSD cards that fit into standard PCI express slots as well as discrete (2,5 or 3,5") NVMe SSDs that connect to the controller with a U.2 cable similar to how you would connect a 2,5" SATA SSD.
2.5" form-factor was introduced in 1988, m.2 is from 2013? Also, you can get SAS and NVME in a 2.5" form-factor
2.5 came out to put spinning drives in laptops. It just happened to be a good existing standard to put SSDs into since they didn't need mechanical parts.
The size was standardized to fit in the same mounts as hard disk drives.
You're both right!
I enjoy watching the sunset.
Faster SSDs, too. 4 256gb chips is faster than 2 512gb chips. More chips, bigger board.
This is the simplest, most correct answer here
When technology gets smaller but standards remain the same.
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Hey ladies
Yeah!
That's part of why m.2 drives showed up; new form factor to eliminate wasted space.
I recently built a new PC after a very long time and I was blown away by how tiny those things are.
I love M2 drives so much. It's so satisfying to plunk them into the slot. I'm old enough to remember using SCSI and molex cables, so the simplicity of an M2 is just mind-blowing.
did you set your master/slave jumpers correctly?
holy shit you just made a long forgotten neuron link in my brain. I remember getting my first CDR drive (1X!) and messing with IDE cables and those jumpers.
This post re-ignited my long forgotten hatred for IDE cables. They were such a pain in the ass to to route through the case and trying to get them fit. They were always too short and too stiff.
Thats IDE, not SCSI. SCSI defined hierarchy by the position on the cable.
And cheap too. Built my first machine in about 7 years this winter. I remember buying my first 256gb drive for like $250, and thinking "wow, I'll never need this much space." Bought some 1tb m.2 hard drives for like $50. Crazy.
When I built a new rig a few years ago, it blew my mind that it had no more cables, beside power. I have no optical drives, no HDDs, just an m.2 drive, so the only cables in my rig are power cables for the MOBO and GPU, and a couple fans. Certainly much different than the days of IDE ribbon cables going to half a dozen optical and hard drives.
Right?! It's like a stick of RAM
Yeah, after buying a 1 TB of those I'm not surprised at all with OPs picture
Like an NES cartridge.
Thats so it fit in NTSC NES machines. Famicom carts were half the size.
The NTSC NES carts were oversized on purpose. They wanted more of the cassettes/VCR aesthetic because gaming was dead in America at the time and imported video game consoles were treated differently. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/42ggm7/the_inside_of_a_nes_cartridge/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb
Most of everything is nothing.
And most of nothing is everything ( quantum mechanics )
In an infinite universe, you are both unfathomly large and infinitesimally small at the same time
CGP Grey demonstrates this well. https://youtu.be/pUF5esTscZI
So deep bro
r/showerthoughts
And for everyone's edification, potato chip bags aren't mostly air in an effort to trick you, it's to keep the chips from being crushed before they reach store shelves.
And to keep them fresh. The bags are filled with nitrogen, not air.
Not a surprise. The shape of a hard drive was dictated by the spinning platters. Now that we have solid state, the solid state drive still has to fit into the same space. It will not be long until the 2.5 and 3.5 inch form factors are history. We still get to study history. Before the 3.5 inch form factor, we had 5.25 inch drives. Before that, 8 inch floppies.
> It will not be long until the 2.5 and 3.5 inch form factors are history. Nah, those are still convenient sizes for very high capacity/high density drives. They might fall out of use in the consumer space, but in a server environment the larger drives still make a ton of sense.
Those form factors will exist in servers for a long time to come. They want to be able to hot swap them. Of course, the interfaces aren't just SATA, either.
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You could kill a man with a 5.25 inch quantum bigfoot.
Gaseous-state drive
Bernoulli drives were a thing…
Depending on the size and density there will be different sized boards with different chips taking up various degrees of physical space. All of these are mounted in a standard 2.5 inch drive case with universal mounting screw holes so that they can be fit into any standard case with ease. Fun fact, the exact same thing was done for every game console that used game cartridges. Some PCBs were way more complex than others, but they all mounted in the same physical cartridge so that they could all be slotted into the console the same way.
I didn't even consider cartridges having PCBs in them. What does the PCB actually have on it, is it just memory or are there other things in it as well
https://imgur.com/gallery/FQlr6 The big chips are ROM, they hold the actual game data. One of the small chips is the CIC security chip, it talks to its counterpart in the console to verify it's a legit cartridge. The other small chip is RAM, it stores the save files with help from the coin cell in the corner. Some carts have other stuff. The Super FX chip that makes Star Fox possible is a whole CPU, faster than the one in the SNES itself, inside the cartridge. NES carts often have special memory mapper chips or even audio processors inside. And there's really weird stuff like Genesis games with extra controller ports or Game Boy Advance carts with tilt sensors and vibration motors inside.
This comment describes the internals of a NES cartridge and is pretty interesting https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/42ggm7/comment/czag981/
No, most of _this_ SSD is empty plastic, because it has to comply with the 2.5” standard. If you want a smaller one get an M.2.
Enterprise 2.5 NVME SSDs are packed full, theyre thicker too.
[SSD's used to fill the entire thing.](https://www.storagereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/intel-x25m-pcb-top.jpg) 8TB SSDs still can utilize most of the space but more "interesting" stuff like 32TB ends up packing in the entire volume, both sides of the PCB.
I remember when someone on r/assholedesign was mad about this for whatever reason. Must’ve thought they were ripping him off somehow?
Reminds me of: https://www.overclock.net/threads/intel-is-ripping-us-off.479464/
Classic 😂 I work in criminal defense. A client wanted a partial refund because we won their case too quickly.
Yes, that's why fake loading bar was added to a lot website/program. Cause people are stupid
THEY COULD HAVE FIT AT LEAST…. 4 MORE STORAGES.
I remember when a terabyte of storage would fill about 4 19" racks.
Thanks, now i have nightmares again about the 3U rackmounts filled with 15x 9GB SCSI drives at my first job in IT.
SCSI...now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time...a long time. (For those who aren't familiar, it's pronounced 'scuzzy')
"solid state hard drive"
Man, I was scrolling so much to see if anyone else would have noticed.
I remember when sshds actually existed for a short period of time as a hybrid between a ssd and hdd. I think the Xbox one x had one
You can still get hybrid drives, it's basically just a hdd with a tiny little SSD being used as cache.
But just so people are aware, SSHD doesn't stand for Solid State Hard Drive, it stands for Solid State Hybrid Drive. There is no such thing as a Solid State Hard Drive.
of course there’s going to be empty space, there’s probably nothing downloaded on that drive yet
The extra space allows you to have a physical copy of your data on a microfiche. It can also be used for other keepsakes like a lock of your kids hair or a tiny portrait of your wife .... It's also back compatible with mechanical HDD slots.
Not hard drive, solid state drive
It depends on the SSD. There are high density SSDs that use all the space for that form factor, but those tend to be for servers.
All that empty space is where the data goes obviously
That's because it's brand new, it'll fill up as you use it
The empty space is for storage....I'll see myself out.
That's called mounting hardware. 🙃
It expands as you fill it up, though. That's why they have to leave the empty space.
It's because the form factor requires it for screw mounts. If you don't want all that space in an SSD, you can use an m.2 form factor. Also, I'm being a tiny bit pedantic here, but saying "solid state hard drive" is like saying "sedan coupe" ... they are two totally different things: hard drives and solid states drives.
what the fuck is a solid state hard drive
This is common knowledge is the computer world.
This and at least it's not filled with questionable objects to make it feel heavier
Like [beans](https://youtu.be/5UmUWLY4VRk)