Just opened an old 2.5" solid state drive and was amazed how empty the inside was.

Cisco001

Why are you open the 500GB one?
You could simply get a £3 case and use it as external drive...

onomatopoeia99

SneakySpectator said:

I had an old PC that I wanted to get rid of so decided to strip it and sell the cpu and gpu but scrap everything else. When I took the solid state drives out they felt empty, like there wasn't actually anything inside the case. 

So I opened it up and was totally amazed at how much empty space is inside. Take a look 



The bottom one is 120gb and the top one is 500gb. Is there any logical reason why they have so much extra space? You could reduce the size of these drives by half... Sure it's not that big a deal as they're relatively small components anyway but I just don't understand why they have so much extra space if they don't need it?

I've looked on google images and even 4tb ssd still only uses half the case so it's not like the larger capacity drives need a larger board inside or anything.

There is nothing amazing about this.  Look at how small a 128GB USB thumb drive is - mine sticks out about 1/4" from the socket, just enough to get your fingers to grip it for removal.  The storage is basically the same technology, just the interface is different, so the space required will be little different.  the 2.5" drive form factor allows more room for things but really what you pictured could have been made much, much smaller.

A change to form factor is a much bigger ting in the computer hardware world than a change to the internals. Think about all the cases being made that are designed to take drives (of whatever type) of that size.

EnPointe

SneakySpectator said:

paradigital said:

The logical reason is that 2.5” HDDs are a long standing form factor, so to keep compatibility with the maximum number of drives and devices, the sizes were kept to the same footprint (though different heights were available).

You only have to look at M.2 SATA drives to see how small they CAN be once the legacy SATA connector was ditched and the footprint changed to suit.  The 2230 form factor is barely larger than a postage stamp.

So you're saying when the 2.5" ssd was first invented, it would have actually taken up the whole of the case? But now as tech has advanced, the size has decreased but they just keep the case size the same so legacy ssd can still fit together with current bay sizes and stuff?

the 2.5in  drive standard size was invented when it would have been 'spinning  rust' inside them  for laptop use