A Reminder Of Why Removable Disk Packs Went Out Of Fashion

Tricky things, removeable storage devices. Requiring fine tolerances between medium and drive is just asking for trouble. Here <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/03/who_me/> is a story of how a crash in one removeable 1960s-era unit ended up destroying a whole string of disk drives. I can remember also reading, in an old Computer Centre bulletin from an Australian university archived on Bitsavers, an item on their policy on removeable drive cartridges: you could only use cartridges allocated by them, you were not allowed to bring in cartridges from elsewhere. A similar thing happened to me, when the Zip drive in my 1998-vintage PowerMac G3 developed the infamous “click of death”, I only killed a couple of cartridges before I realized I should never use that drive again. Nowadays we have SD cards and hot-pluggable USB drives, which are a bit more robust against such failure modes. Or are they ... ?
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro