It really is amazing, and just popping an m.2 into a motherboard directly is just so... easy. And I think Gen5s are what, 2.5x faster than what you're showing here?
Mildly Interesting
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
You could go back further to the drives mini computers used to use, which basically for in a file cabinet. Or old mainframes, which were the file cabinet.
Do manufacturers use the extra space for larger batteries, or just to make the product smaller overall?
Yes.
Having grown up along with the computer industry, sometimes I have that surreal sense of awe when I remember where we came from and what I used to consider cutting edge. Just upgraded my computer with a few SSDs, one an M.2, and before I put it in I was looking at it and trying to come to grasp with the scale of things (size and speed) vs. my first C-64 computer and Datasette. I know the numbers...they don't convey the difference in the head.
And it will continue...
Soon we'll have 100TB "drives" the size of a thumb nail for 50€.
We'll all (we geeks anyways) walk around with the Wikipedia, all Star Trek movies and so on in our pocket :-)
The 1TB and up microSD cards blow my mind.
And they all last until about the same date
The new hard drives are almost the size of old SD cards (not the micro ones).