[RndTbl] Dimensional hard drives?

Kevin McGregor kevin.a.mcgregor at gmail.com
Mon Jan 21 19:47:22 CST 2013


I don't get it -- you feel cheated because you paid for something that you
thought was 3.5" wide and you got *more*? And it fit perfectly where you
wanted to put it? And it had all the other specifications you desired?
You're just weird, man.

I always assumed the measurement referred to the physical media, not the
device as a whole. Have you measured a 3.5" floppy, with and without the
hard shell?

Kevin


On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 3:18 PM, Adam Thompson <athompso at athompso.net>wrote:

> Ever double-check an assumption, only to find it false, and feel like the
> rug just got yanked out from under your feet?
>
> Go measure the width of a so-called 3.5" hard drive.  Yeah, go ahead.
>  It's 4" wide.  Now go measure the width of a so-called 2.5" hard drive.
>  Uh-huh... it's 2.75" wide.  I just (re-?)discovered that and felt just as
> cheated as when I found out that the nominal sizes of dimensional lumber
> are complete B.S.!
>
> I knew this once upon a time, but I guess I forgot... 5.25" & 3.5" refer
> to the fact that it fits into the bay where you would have been able to fit
> a floppy drive accommodating the corresponding-size floppy disk.  I can't
> find any derivation for why we call a 2.75" drive a 2.5" drive, since
> there's no such thing as a 2.5" floppy[1]!  Perhaps the internal platter is
> 2.5" wide?
>
> (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Form_factors)
>
> -Adam
>
>
> [1] OK, yes, there a 2.5" floppy did exist briefly, but it was never any
> sort of standard and I've never seen one in person AFAIK.  FYI, the Sony
> micro-floppy format was not 2.5", it was 90mm (closer to 2", anyway).
>
>
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