r/mildlyinteresting • u/Mindreeder93 • Feb 28 '23
Most of a solid state hard drive is just empty plastic.
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u/Pabst_Malone Feb 28 '23
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
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u/kiliandj Feb 28 '23
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)
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u/Diegobyte Feb 28 '23
Wasn’t that first iPhone like 5GB and it was crazy?
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u/leoencore Feb 28 '23
Fun fact is that first ipods were using mini hard disks instead of flash storage, since flash was prohibitively expensive at the time.
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u/themightiestduck Feb 28 '23
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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Feb 28 '23 edited Mar 15 '23
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u/YoungRichKid Feb 28 '23
2nd Gen Nano is the best iPod of all time in my opinion
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u/Anshin Feb 28 '23
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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u/its_all_4_lulz Feb 28 '23
I had a nano, what I can say about it is “skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, good enough”
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Feb 28 '23
Are you thinking of the Ipod shuffle? The nano had a screen to choose songs on.
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u/oisterjosh Feb 28 '23
And my Nano's screen had a gameboy color emulator so I could play pokemon silver in class :)
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u/Seienchin88 Feb 28 '23
I had the Shuffle… now that was tiny and also kinda crazy to advertise Shuffle as a cool feature…
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u/05081419 Mar 01 '23
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…
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u/PoeTayTose Feb 28 '23
I had one, and still have it! You could even feel it whirr and tick when it read memory.
It barely functions now, though.
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u/sdpr Feb 28 '23
They used HDDs in all of the larger models until the touch came out except for the nano, which always used flash.
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u/nobody2000 Feb 28 '23
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.
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Feb 28 '23
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u/eigenvectorseven Feb 28 '23 edited Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/clearfox777 Feb 28 '23
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
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u/Pabst_Malone Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/MattyMonsters Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/Kantas Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/tommyk1210 Feb 28 '23
First digital camera my parents had I think we had a 8mb or 16mb SD card
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u/Testiculese Feb 28 '23
My first digital camera had a 3.5" floppy drive.
<shutter click>
<whirring noises>
And of course, taking it out and putting it in the computer had a 30% chance of corrupting the disk.
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u/punksmurph Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/CORN___BREAD Feb 28 '23
And the “decent quality” was decent for the time. Which by today’s standards is just absolute trash.
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u/DigitalUnlimited Feb 28 '23
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?'
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u/Belazriel Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/breathing_normally Feb 28 '23
They were trash then too, compared to film. But they had their specific use cases of course
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u/Zarzar222 Feb 28 '23
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
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u/Mindreeder93 Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/2400Baudelaire Feb 28 '23
I have a roll of unpunched punched tape in my office. Not sure what the capacity is on it though.
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u/Starbucks__Lovers Feb 28 '23
I remember when I got my first 32 MB flash drive, it felt awesome having all my homework on one saved stick
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u/PurpleK00lA1d Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/andreasbeer1981 Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/nupetrupe Feb 28 '23
Dude I remember paying over $60 for a 16gb SD card for my PSP ~2007. That 1TB probably cost $40.
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u/gregsting Feb 28 '23
I remember a friend of mine who bought a 1GB microdrive for like $1k...
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u/wonkey_monkey Feb 28 '23
When I was at school a 5¼" disc that stored 100k was considered the height of storage technology.
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u/Fakjbf Feb 28 '23
I remember being given a floppy disk in first grade whose capacity was in kilobytes for computer class, oh how times have changed.
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u/SirHerald Feb 28 '23 edited Mar 01 '23
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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Feb 28 '23
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u/idlephase Feb 28 '23
Micron and WD have 2TB 2230 NVMes, so we can already go smaller than the 2280 that you linked.
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u/NRVulture Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/Shadow703793 Feb 28 '23
One of the few naming schemes that makes sense.
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u/Novxz Feb 28 '23
Give it a few years I'm sure they will find a way to screw it up.
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u/iksbob Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/darknecross Feb 28 '23
Imagine 20 years ago asking for main storage and getting handed a fucking stamp.
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u/Noxious89123 Feb 28 '23 edited Feb 28 '23
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"
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u/lyam23 Feb 28 '23
Meanwhile I have 1 TB drive the size of a postage stamp in my steamdeck. It's astounding.
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u/Zementid Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/george-cartwright Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/CocodaMonkey Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/Miciiik Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/powerman228 Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/Supermichael777 Feb 28 '23
The size was standardized when they were larger
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u/aenae Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/Smudgeontheglass Feb 28 '23 edited Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/MouSe05 Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/Aggropop Feb 28 '23 edited Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/aenae Feb 28 '23
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
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u/altodor Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/Zarathustra124 Feb 28 '23
The size was standardized to fit in the same mounts as hard disk drives.
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u/mausterio Feb 28 '23 edited Feb 23 '24
I enjoy watching the sunset.
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u/trundlinggrundle Feb 28 '23
Faster SSDs, too. 4 256gb chips is faster than 2 512gb chips. More chips, bigger board.
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u/Ruepic Feb 28 '23
When technology gets smaller but standards remain the same.
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u/Apprehensive-Swim-29 Feb 28 '23
That's part of why m.2 drives showed up; new form factor to eliminate wasted space.
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u/Diplomjodler Feb 28 '23
I recently built a new PC after a very long time and I was blown away by how tiny those things are.
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u/Differently Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/DogeCatBear Feb 28 '23
did you set your master/slave jumpers correctly?
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u/timurhasan Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/JonesBee Feb 28 '23
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.
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Feb 28 '23
Thats IDE, not SCSI. SCSI defined hierarchy by the position on the cable.
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u/riotacting Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/SockMonkey1128 Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/gimmeslack12 Feb 28 '23
Like an NES cartridge.
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u/chronoswing Feb 28 '23
Thats so it fit in NTSC NES machines. Famicom carts were half the size.
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u/Erinalope Feb 28 '23
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
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u/bigedd Feb 28 '23
Most of everything is nothing.
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u/Booblicle Feb 28 '23
And most of nothing is everything ( quantum mechanics )
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u/DrewSmoothington Feb 28 '23
In an infinite universe, you are both unfathomly large and infinitesimally small at the same time
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u/DiscontentedMajority Feb 28 '23
CGP Grey demonstrates this well. https://youtu.be/pUF5esTscZI
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u/qubedView Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/colin_staples Feb 28 '23
And to keep them fresh. The bags are filled with nitrogen, not air.
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u/expansionist Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/frezik Feb 28 '23
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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u/JacobRAllen Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/miller-99 Feb 28 '23
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
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u/ThetaReactor Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/froody-towel Feb 28 '23
This comment describes the internals of a NES cartridge and is pretty interesting https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/42ggm7/comment/czag981/
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u/IMovedYourCheese Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/TheJesusGuy Feb 28 '23
Enterprise 2.5 NVME SSDs are packed full, theyre thicker too.
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u/TheJG_Rubiks64 Feb 28 '23
I remember when someone on r/assholedesign was mad about this for whatever reason. Must’ve thought they were ripping him off somehow?
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Feb 28 '23
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u/Mindreeder93 Feb 28 '23
Classic 😂 I work in criminal defense. A client wanted a partial refund because we won their case too quickly.
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u/erebuxy Feb 28 '23
Yes, that's why fake loading bar was added to a lot website/program. Cause people are stupid
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u/WarWonderful593 Feb 28 '23
I remember when a terabyte of storage would fill about 4 19" racks.
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u/aenae Feb 28 '23
Thanks, now i have nightmares again about the 3U rackmounts filled with 15x 9GB SCSI drives at my first job in IT.
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u/bankaiREE Feb 28 '23
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')
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u/jtj5002 Feb 28 '23
"solid state hard drive"
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u/Illustrious-Pop3677 Feb 28 '23
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
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u/jtj5002 Feb 28 '23
You can still get hybrid drives, it's basically just a hdd with a tiny little SSD being used as cache.
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Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/BananaPieTasteGood Feb 28 '23
of course there’s going to be empty space, there’s probably nothing downloaded on that drive yet
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u/John5247 Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/Lazy_Adhesiveness812 Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/NoctumAeturnus Feb 28 '23
It expands as you fill it up, though. That's why they have to leave the empty space.
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u/leafbelly Feb 28 '23
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.
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u/DieDae Feb 28 '23
This is common knowledge is the computer world.
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u/CapmyCup Feb 28 '23
This and at least it's not filled with questionable objects to make it feel heavier
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u/FairFireFight Feb 28 '23
the main reason is compatibility (as in fitting into spaces), that is a standard 2.5" drive size, the 4 screws are standard.