I heard some people say theyre the same thing, but others are adamant that they have different meanings. Which is it?

  • SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    There’s been some movement over time but in general disk was used for pc because you had Hard Disk Drives. Then their counterpart the floppy diskette (disks).

    Disc as a term was used for media like compact discs and subsequently digital video discs, etc. and then pc components allowing them to be read and then written to did exist for PC’s and, as such, had the disc moniker. But that’s because they were already “discs” branding wise.

    USB thumb drives, being created as portable removable media for pc’s were a kind of solid state disk and so they use the k. Even NVME, being primarily storage for computing devices, can also colloquially be called “disks” but more and more people just refer to them as drives and I suspect those who refer to them as disks may do so out of older computer hardware habits and that utilities (fdisk, df, etc)call any such media a “disk”.