Need technology name info

[MaMcardle47]

I am writing a novel in which a character has the job of going into a room and cataloguing video clips (similar to YouTube). My question is what to call the memory devices she accesses. I'm afraid if I call them servers people won't know what I mean but in the context, SSD doesn't make sense.  "She walked into the shadowed and cramped room, seeing the standard computer setup and the floor to ceiling shelves of (WHAT) that she was expected to wade through." Anyone able to help?

[minibois]

You could try to literally describe what the character sees, with an explanation of the context after:

Quote

She walked into the shadowed and cramped room, seeing the standard computer setup and the floor to ceiling shelves of data, in the form of hard drive disks. that she was expected to wade through, using the computer, which interlocks all the data.

 

[Radium_Angel]

6 minutes ago, MaMcardle47 said:

floor to ceiling shelves of (WHAT)

Reel to Reel tapes.

It's what all the cool IT people used....

 

....in the 60s 

[JovanD]

Memory cards? Hard drives? Compact Disks?

[AbydosOne]

8 minutes ago, MaMcardle47 said:

Anyone able to help?

If you want to invoke some faux retro, I'd go with "cassettes" or "cartridges". Perhaps "hard drives"? Are the shelves like bookshelves but of [data devices]?

Some nerd out there might appreciate the slight parallel between shelves of disks and a literal disk shelf (basically a rack mounted device that holds drives but doesn't contain any CPU and is controlled by another server).

[Rybo]

What technology level are we talking here?  Is it current day tech, future tech, or at some point in the past?  If it's future tech, just make something up -- call them memory cylinders or info gel packs or ribo-vials (the memory is encoded into DNA strands and the DNA is stored in small vials) -- and let the reader glean the meaning through context (with minimal explanations if you go way off the wall).  If it's present day tech, (or frankly past tech that is still electronic in nature), I'd just go with hard drive -- or storage drive if you don't want to date it to the pre-SSD era.  If we're talking analogue storage, storage cassettes.  

 

[WhitetailAni]

RAMDrives?
Sounds cool.

[Bitter]

Cables, from floor to ceiling haphazardly connected to arrays of hard disks as if the machine had grown organically expanding to accommodate the needs of the user, each cluster of drives farther and farther away from the mainframe in the corner of the room, each layer becoming increasingly more disorganized in it's deployment suggesting that after the first few clusters the user became more enslaved to the needs of the machine, their drive to expand becoming increasing more frantic as they became blinded to disheveled mess they were creating in the name of their work, their endless work to catalog the never ending dirge of videos streaming from the consciousness of the world...

[mariushm]

You could invent names, mix two shortened names, whatever ... ex memchips,  datadiscs , mediachip, memory cube / memcube , data crystal, movitape ...

[AbydosOne]

12 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Cables, from floor to ceiling haphazardly connected to arrays of hard disks as if the machine had grown organically expanding to accommodate the needs of the user, each cluster of drives farther and farther away from the mainframe in the corner of the room, each layer becoming increasingly more disorganized in it's deployment suggesting that after the first few clusters the user became more enslaved to the needs of the machine, their drive to expand becoming increasing more frantic as they became blinded to disheveled mess they were creating in the name of their work, their endless work to catalog the never ending dirge of videos streaming from the consciousness of the world...

What a poetic way of describing LTT/LMG pre-office.

[MaMcardle47]

I was working with current day but it definitely would not be hard to shift to alt universe, maybe even slightly steam punk. Thanks so much for the ideas! 

[Bitter]

23 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

What a poetic way of describing LTT/LMG pre-office.

It's actually the IT closet at SGC, but close enough. Poor poor Walter...

[StarsMars]

3 hours ago, MaMcardle47 said:

I am writing a novel in which a character has the job of going into a room and cataloguing video clips (similar to YouTube). My question is what to call the memory devices she accesses. I'm afraid if I call them servers people won't know what I mean but in the context, SSD doesn't make sense.  "She walked into the shadowed and cramped room, seeing the standard computer setup and the floor to ceiling shelves of (WHAT) that she was expected to wade through." Anyone able to help?

Hard drives.  Most people will understand that and if not they’ll figure it out

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Off Topic