Why are Hybrid SSD / Magnetic drives using the SSHD acronym?


I love technology and I love acronyms, but I hate it when they start reusing old acronyms. It was bad enough with "ATM" which we knew as "asynchronous transfer mode" in the broadband packet switching days of computer networking (especially here at Washington University), or short for "atmospheres" or automated teller machines (or the dreaded Adobe Type Manager). But another acronym recently came out for some pretty neat technology: hydrid solid-state and magnetic hard drives. These drives pair a small amount of MLC NAND memory (usually 8GB) with a much higher capacity, more conventional magnetic drive to create a drive with SSD-like performance, yet a large amount of storage (where the magnetic media does not need to be accessed as often either as its most used data is cached to the memory.) So this is a great idea, but they decided to come up with the acronym of SSHD (solid-state hybrid drive) to name this technology. The problem with any Linux geek like myself, is we know "sshd" is the daemon software for Secure Shell or SSH (typically the OpenSSH package in most Linux distributions) which allows encrypted remote terminal access or encrypted file transfer between Linux systems.

So when I started googling to see how people were using these new hybrid drives with Ubuntu or CentOS installations, I started getting all these results about OpenSSH server issues instead. Why did they pick SSHD as the acronym? You cannot even pronounce that as an acronym, and that is always much more fun! Why not HSSD which can be pronounced as "hissed" and is not used for much of anything? Why pick a acronym already used in the tech world?

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