NVMe -v- SSD From Factor (2025 Update)

Yup. Links that prove people think they existed, but no proof that they did.

In the days of removable disc packs, there were ones of that size and larger - but they were more akin to hard drive platters than floppy drives.

Although for added confusion there were SSHDs for a while. These were hybrid drives which were basically conventional HDDs with a small (typically 8GB) embedded SSD in the controller. The logic being that the drive self optimised and used the SSD part as a persistent cache to hold the most frequently used files from the HDD to give performance for access to things like OS files and libraries and often used apps, without the expense of needing a whole drives worth of flash memory.

No I don't think it did (I had a Commodore 64 back in the 1980s). I think there were 8" floppies and such in use in 'professional' computers before then. The cassette drive was an 'as cheap as possible' storage medium for the early home computers.

Thinking about it didn't the original Apple II have floppies and that was before the VIC-20 and C-64?

True, but again that is confusing the form factor (2.5" mechanism) with the drive technology. The actual shape of the enclosure is not what makes it a SSD. Granted there have been fewer iterations of shape for SSDs with 2.5" and M.2 being the most common. (there are also some PCI card mounted form factors)

NVMe drives are never in the 2.5" form factor, the physical interfaces would not be compatible.

NVMe however can be in form factors other than M.2 (just check out any recent Apple product with the NAND flash chips soldered directly to the mobo.

Yup, I remember investing and arm and half a leg in a 1541 floppy for my VIC-20 - cost me about what I paid for the computer!

The commodore C2N datasette first showed up built into the early 2000 series PETs with the "chiclet" keyboards. :

(I would not call the cassette drive "screechy " though it had no speaker, so you could not listen to the audio representation of the data track)

The newest M4 Mac Minis have proprietary plug-in cards that look similar to M.2 but with only flash chips as the controller is on the motherboard, so they're SSD rather than NVMe ... some brave souls are upgrading the chips on them by hot air rework.

Hot air reworking and a microscope is becoming /de rigeur/ in electronics...

OK, I was asking about form factor.

No (or "not so far") they are long PCB devices!

Only as an extra-cost add-on. I used a casette tape unit on my Apple ][ (1977).

Cough:

There is also:

Those aren't NVMe, on most Apple Silicon Macs they are raw flash that talks directly to the SoC. There are some older (~2018) Intel Macbooks that use single chip NVMes, and iPhones >5S also use them. Some 2016-17 have a removable proprietary SSD card that speaks NVMe (and is thus upgradeable), while pre-2016 the proprietary sticks are AHCI SSDs.

Then there's

Finally there's NVMe over Fabrics, using ethernet or Infiniband, including over the internet if you're suitably crazy:

Theo

No, these were all single-platter in cartridges that were front loading, with a long flap lifted at the rear for head access. It was the multi-platter packs, with a carrying handle on top, which used top-loading drives. The drives I used looked like the one in the second picture, I can't remember who made them. The cartridges were yellow, again I can't remember who made them, but there were several manufacturers. The drive controller was a 15" square PCB that could operate two daisy-chained drives, and talked to a Data General Nova CPU board.

Over TCP/IP is also becoming significant (for data centres rather than internet as such)

Yup PET, Apple II and TRS-80 all had floppy options, and they all preceded the VIC. If you are talking about the VIC specifically then tape was the norm for most users, but floppy was an option from fairly soon after release.

Floppies of any type, back then, were a very expensive option, so most made do with a cheap cassette tape system. One brief cheaper option to cassettes, was the 'Floopy' - a contiuous 1/8 inch tape loop, in a tiny cartridge. designed for data, it would read, and write, at several times the speed of cassette tapes. It had a catalogue at the start, and would auto- fast forward, to the data needed. The interface was an S100. I designed a way to adapt from S100, to my system,

Not forgetting the Sinclair microdrive, a similar concept executed cheaply :-)

and OKish on the QL, until I could save up enough for dual 3-1/2 floppies and the interface card.

I am pretty sure that in the 1970's DEC PDP 11/34's typically came with a disk drive that had one fixed 2.5 mb platter and a top loading removable 2.5 mb platter like the RL01

Err, no

The original IBM PC had a cassette interface. If you started it up without a floppy in the drive, it went into "Cassette Basic" IIRC.

Maybe you could use it without a disk drive at all.