Etymology of the use of "Drive" to refer to a digital storage medium


When did the word "drive" begin to be used to refer to a digital storage medium (e.g. disc drive, hard drive, USB drive), and why was this term selected?



Cross-link to related earlier question: "Hard disk" vs. "Hard drive" vs. "Hard disk drive"



Answer



Originally, the drive was not the storage device. It was the mechanism that you mounted the storage device onto.¹ Spools of tape were mounted on the motor spindle of a tape drive, and disk packs and floppy disks were mounted on the motor spindle of a disk drive. The drive imparted to them a spinning motion:



As disk technology matured, it became common for disks to be permanently sealed and non-removable – that is, the disk and the drive became one device. People referred to this device informally as either the disk or the drive. It also became common to refer to it as the hard drive to distinguish it from the floppy drive installed in the same cabinet.²


When companies came along with devices which performed the same function as sealed disk drives, they called them drives too, in order to make clear that they were marketing disk drive replacements: RAM drives, ZIP drives, USB drives, thumbdrives. And when remote file storage functionally replaced these storage devices, it often got the drive label as well: network drive, Google Drive, OneDrive.³


In short, while the word drive still has its original meaning, it now also has a figurative meaning: it can refer to any storage device that takes the place of a traditional storage drive.


Many end users have begun referring to the entire tower or system unit of a personal computer as the hard drive, a further broadening of the term.⁴


Notes


For more about the history of disk drives, see the Wikipedia article “History of hard disk drives”. Much of what I’ve written here also relies on personal knowledge: I have been in the industry for 40 years.




  1. Drive in this original sense is attested in American English by Collins English Dictionary:



    • Drive, American English sense 28, “a device that communicates motion to a machine or machine part”. (Collins)

    • See also the example in American English sense 27a, “any apparatus that transmits power in a motor vehicle: a gear drive”. (op. cit.)




  2. The derivative, computing-specific senses of drive are also attested by Collins. You can see the progressive shift of meaning from the device that transmits motion to the assembly as a whole:



    • Drive, American English sense 29, “(computing) a unit that reads and writes data on magnetic tape, a disk, etc.” (op. cit.)

    • Disk drive, “(computing) the controller and mechanism for reading and writing data on computer disks”. (Collins)

    • Hard drive, “hard disk, or the part that contains the hard disk … a computer drive for hard disks, often, specif., such a drive as distinguished from a floppy-disk drive in the same computer”. (Collins)




  3. See for example in Collins:



    • Thumb drive, “a thumb-sized portable computer hard drive and data storage device”. (Collins)




  4. This usage is not yet attested by a dictionary, but is frequently attested by professionals in information technology who work with the public. Representative samples from the wild:



    He said he was having a problem with a port on the hard drive... of course he'd actually blown the controller chip on his USB card and the hard drive was just fine (Urban Dictionary, 2003)


    When I used to do IT support, the terms "CPU" and "hard drive" were common. As an IT guy I cringed, but at least I knew what people were talking about. (English Language & Usage, 2014)


    the blinking lights I'm seeing on my hard drive 2 blinks pause then 3 blinks pause (personal correspondence, 2017)





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