On 30/12/2024 12:58, Theo wrote: They had a
Frankly, I am still running here on a 100Mbps LAN so high server disk speeds are not much point.
Still running SATA everywhere. Except the laptop which allegedly has an NVMe. I had it 2 years before I noticed. So not much visible improvement there...
No, SSD = Solid State Disk and refers to the storage technology used (flash memory). This is a completely different storage technology from the various magnetic Hard Disk Drive (HDD) technologies with spinning platters.
Both are available in the 2.5" standard drive bay format [1].
Both SSD and HDDs can come equipped with a SATA [2] interfaces.
The form factor of what you are describing is M.2. M.2 drives are a standard width - but available in a number of standard lengths. All M.2 drives are SSDs. Some have a SATA interface (and the same 6 Gbps speed limit of the larger SATA drives). (you can tell which is which - the SATA version has an extra key in the edge connector which will stop a NVMe drive plugging into a SATA only socket)
NVMe (Non Volatile Memory Express) is a different interface designed for easy high speed connectivity with modern PCs. [3]
[1] If you have ever wondered about the sizes - in the home computer era and into the PC era the first standard drive size was the 8" floppy. That happened to be 5.25" wide. So the next standard was the 5.25" floppy, which was was 3.5" wide. The 3.5" drive was 2.5" wide - you get the picture :-) [2] Serial AT Attachment (where AT came from the IBM PC era PC "Advanced Technology" - it was an evolution or what was called ATA (now bacronymed to PATA), which moved much of the drive controller intelligence and electronics onto the drive to save needing complex drive controller cards in the computer. This so called "Integrated Drive Electronics" (IDE) drive made storage more of a commodity item and reduced costs for PC makers. [3] As the slower ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) bus of the original PC gave way to much faster expansion buses, eventually the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus came to dominate. PCI itself evolved from a parallel form to a serial form, and now PCI express (PCIe) is common on most motherboards. NVMe drives are a good fit for that giving much more interface throughput.
Eh!?
We had proper 100% sized floppies, not 66% shrunk versions ...
I was not aware there was a floppy standard larger than 8" in common use?
I don't think there ever was, but you seemed to be saying 8" floppies were actually 5¼", and 5¼" floppies were actually 3½" etc, and so on?
No I was saying (possibly not very clearly!) that the length of each new format matched the width of the previous one. So if you keep the same aspect ratio, a 5.25" wide drive was 8" deep, a 3,5" drive was 5.25" deep etc. (bit like the way A2 is twice the area of A3, thence A4 etc)
Our office used ones larger than that - 10" ?
Yes - SSD has *never* meant the old spinning drives, it has *always* meant solid state.
I can find no record of such anywhere. The original and the largest was 8"
I've found reference to IBM 12" floppies. Since our kit involved IBM typesetting, I suspect these are the ones I was thinking about.
I didnt find any evidence of that. Links?
But in practice questions about speeding up computers always include the advice to replace the hard drive with an SSD so its everyday usage is SSD, a solid state device in the format of a 2.5" hard drive.
Again a search for NVMe returns the long pcb device so it seems to be an accepted way of differing between the two.
Been there with all of that. I'm pretty sure our Display Writers had 8" floppies and I have a brand new 5.25" floppy drive here with a box of floppies that goes with my BBC Master. I also remember spending my Christmas bonus one year on a 3.5" floppy from Viglen (in West London?) and the Watford DFS for the Beeb!
Did the screechy cassette drive (as used by my Vic 20) come before the floppies?
There were certainly 12" IBM hard discs, they were used in varying numbers in cartridges and packs. These would have been single-platter:
And the early ones were exceptionally slow, slower than a spinning drive.
I have an 8GB one in an Acer Aspire (soldered) and I found the machine ran much quicker using an external USB 1.8" drive.
Wiki has a list of floppy sizes, but nothing larger than 8"
True, most of the oddball sizes are smaller, hence newer, hence more likely to be remembered, but if larger existed, I'd expect someone from alt.folklore.computers would have added them to the list.
I found people who were probably misremembering, or confusing disk packs with floppies
Were the drive mechanisms made by IBM and licensed to others? I see DEC and HP labels on some of those. Also, you sure it was top loaded (rather than slot-loaded)? From the second image, looks like that wouldn't have been possible (unless the drive slid out on rails)?
Either way, we learned to remove them all when the DEC engineer turned up. They had a habit of using whatever drive was mounted as a test disk to test the drive - just wrote all over it. They took umbrage when we tried changing their login (default was User: FIELD, Password: SERVICE). I'm not sure how they got on with the VAXes running the accelerator (running cost: $10,000 per hour), however.
No, but reel to reel tape did. In fact it was used as what we would now call 'swap' memory.
When the only RAM was core store, and 1KB was a million quid ±, a tape drive was way cheaper and stored more information
Just realised it's prolly an RK05, see:
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