Quote:

While the technical definition of a drive is a device that spins disks or tapes in order to read and write data; for example, a hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, or tape drive, in reality we do not use the word that way. "Write it to the floppy drive." "Store it on the hard drive." We LONG ago (post-modernally speaking) stopped thinking of a drive as a motor that turns a disk or moves a tape.



Good point. However, I might write to a hard drive, where the medium and the mechanics are one unit, but in the case of a CD or, if you have an old enough machine, a floppy, you write to the dis(c,k) not the drive. But in the case of the USB thumb drive, we're back to the medium and the mechanics being a unit again. Certainly to the computer it looks the same as, say, a hard drive. This seems to be enough. There's also the tendency of terminology to be more conservative than the technology of which it speaks. Cf., dialing a touch tone phone.