#worm drive

We got a worm

Yes! I have a name for it!

I remembered to ask my brother about the insanely heavy-for-it’s-size object I’d dug out of the grass.

He called it a worm drive.

Inside are gears that convert the energy from high speed rotation into slow speed rotation with high power.

I did some searches and found it under terms like worm gear box, worm reduction drive, worm gear reducer, and so on. I…

The IBM 3363 WORM Drive (Write Once Read Many) is considered a predecessor to the modern CD-R based media. It used cartridges slightly larger and much thicker than a floppy disk and was meant to be a solution to the inconveniences of a hard-disk drive (such as lack of portability, instability and data loss). It also was more cost efficient than buying a hard drive. While the drive was very expensive itself (around $2000) each cartridge could hold more data than a hard drive (around 100mb vs the usual 75mb) and cost only around $60-$80. It’s downsides were the slow write speeds and being unable to delete/write over used space on the disk (meaning once you filled up a cartridge you couldn’t change it in any way). Cartridge based WORM drives are no longer used but CD-R and DVD-R discs are considered modern examples of WORM media.