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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

Spoiler: the hard drives aren't squeezed into a physical VHS cassette. Instead the tape is used to store the equivalent of four hard drives worth of data.

As someone who owned VHS tapes and several 90s-era hard drives, and remembers the sizes of each, the title had me confused for a minute.

Basically like an Iomega Jazz drive.

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Thanks for clarifying, though I've got to say, your mind is interesting for considering that they might have physically squeezed 4 hard drives into (or inside?) a VHS cassette.

I did the same, the title made me think of some long-lost TARDIS-esque technology exclusive to VHS tape shell that allowed for smuggling.

Realistically it wasn’t what was talked about, but it was a fun idea while it lasted.

Interesting idea, although the weight of the fake VHS cassette would have given it away. Plus, hard drives from that era with their cast aluminium frames were notoriously hard to squeeze...

If you think that would be heavy, imagine what 120 Libraries of Congress would weigh! You would need a VHS tape the length of 4 football fields.

I was imagining four present-day laptop drives. But then I remembered just how big HDs were back in ~1995...

The microdrive[1] existed. You could fit a lot more than four of those in a VHS cassette.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

Gotta say I'm surprised anyone interpreted the title literally but reading it again I get it (it is conceivable to somehow physically fit harddrives into a cassette).

I too considered this possibility. Though I didn't assign high probability to this interpretation.

I got confused by your comment because the only "size" I associate with hard drives is in stored data...

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