That’s different - you actually removed the hard disks from the drive in the beasts I was referring to. You never remove modern day high density hard disks from drives these days; you might remove the drive from the computer but that isn’t what I was getting at.
I’d need some evidence before I could believe this is why they were called hard disks.
When the Model T ruled the roost, every car on the road was a Ford, even if it was a Stutz Bearcat. Or so I’ve been told and have read. I wonder how long it took for that to disappear.
I want to be definite here about the hard/floppy disk thing. It only has to do with the platters being hard/floppy.
When I taught Computing to non-majors this was a major confusion. They’d store their stuff on “the hard drive” in the PC lab, but in reality store it on the floppy and blah … blah blah.
So I’d take a 3.5" floppy and just rip it open in front of them. See … floppy.
There were removable hard drive platters for several years. The Winchester drive, where the platters weren’t removable was a later thing, that lead to the more familiar HDs. I used removable platter drives on the Xerox Altos in the 1970s, for example. Single platter things that functioned much like floppies in terms of general usage. Just really, really big. But they could store a whopping 2.5MB!