Why would it be described like that? It’s not like SSDs or optical media are particularly soft.
In: Technology
It comes from way back in history.
“Hard disk drives” and “floppy disk drives” were two different types of magnetic storage developed in the 1950s and 1960s – hard disks for storage in computers themselves, and floppy disks for portable storage.
For many years, floppy disks were literally floppy – they used a very thin plastic disk protected by a very thin plastic envelope, meaning that if you held one in your hand and wagged your hand back and forth, the disk would actually flop like a thick sheet of paper.
Floppy disks finally stopped being used in the early 2000s as thumb drives and flash memory cards like SD became popular and cheap. But there was no reason to stop calling hard disk drives “hard disk drives”, because by that point they had already been called that since before most people were even *born*.
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