The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/LaundryMan2008 on 2025-03-28 19:35:29.
This will be my last data storage mediums post for a while both because I’m going to Spain which is going to take up 10 days of my time which is going to take up one of my Fridays (unless I take a picture of a medium before I go to have them ready while in Spain if I do get one in the meantime) and because I have ran out of the backlog of mediums that I had built up in all of that time that I wasn’t posting which means that any new mediums that I get will be single ones so it probably won’t last me more than one week for the posts and if I do get more than one it’s probably related ones like a data tape and cleaning tape which wouldn’t make much sense to separate for the data storage mediums posts.
Anyways, for this post I dug out my dad’s old SSD that he put away when he upgraded to his newer one which was intended to go into my old slow laptop in an attempt to speed it up but it didn’t fit in the hard drive slot so it sat under my bed waiting for it’s chance to shine in one of my posts which it has the chance to today.
This 2.5” SATA Solid State Drive (SSD) format is intended to replace hard drives both in PCs and laptops and since most are 2.5”, they can be wiped and reused in both systems without any modifications to either, they come in lots of interfaces of which some more common ones are SATA, SAS and U.2/U.3, the higher storage ones can sometimes max out the interface making it a bottleneck when transfering lots of files at once.
Some of the earliest SSDs were 3.5” in form factor due to lower density flash storage back then and were used in volatile conditions where durability was required like a plane’s computer or in a rocket/satellite and they were very expensive to manufacture which adds to the rarity of obtaining one today, the only available 3.5” form factor SSD that you can buy now are in 50TB and 100TB sizes but are incredibly expensive (intended for datacenters) and if any broke, they would get destroyed which means that none of them would be left for us peasants to look at, these drives are usually under a contract so even if their policy didn’t require destruction, they would still have to destroy it due to the highly custom chipset used to control them so that no one else can reverse engineer and make one of their own or improve on it as a competing product.
From my research there wasn’t a 5.25” SSD ever released even back when flash storage wasn’t as dense but I’m happy to be corrected on that and make me add that to my list of white whale mediums that I’ll get at some point later in my collecting when all of the common cheaper stuff is collected, I know that there were some 3.5” SSDs made back then but I can’t pin any exact models down to hunt for which only leaves me with the 50TB and 100TB drives that are absolutely confirmed to have been made.
Thank you for reading this Friday‘s post and I hope you have a great day, if you have any queries, thoughts about the format, additional information or to point out a mistake, please put them in the comments :)
Link to previous post, post 19 (39th week):My data storage mediums, post 19 (38th week) : r/DataHoarder
Link to future post, (To be posted)
Picture of the SSD on my wall, it holds 60GB and uses the SATA II interface
