Etymology tree
Middle English spinnen
English spin
Proto-Indo-European *-kos
Proto-Germanic *-gaz
Proto-West Germanic *-g
Old English -iġ
Middle English -y
English -y
English spinny
From spin + -y.
Noun sense 1 (“hard drive”) is an allusion to disk platters spinning inside a hard drive while powered on.
Meanings
(informal) Associated with spinning; moving with a spinning motion.
Then you got a double whammy - your eyes were full of orange and your head was spinny and dizzy. 2006, J Purkis, Finding a Different Kind of Normal: Misadventures with Asperger Syndrome:
1997, DAN Seemiller, M Holowchak, Winning Table Tennis: Skills, Drills, and Strategies - all 3 versions »
The sound at contact should be solid and crisp, not “spinny.”
“It is a spinny thing with wires in it, with the wires wrapped around something (coil) and N and S (unsure what N and S were)." 2003, Ian S. Ginns, Stephen J. Norton, Campbell J. McRobbie, “Adding Value to the Teaching and Learning of Design and Technology”, in Pupils ^([sic]) Attitudes Towards Technology Annual Conference June 2003, pages 115–118:
Etymology tree
Middle English spinnen
English spin
Proto-Indo-European *-kos
Proto-Germanic *-gaz
Proto-West Germanic *-g
Old English -iġ
Middle English -y
English -y
English spinny
From spin + -y.
Noun sense 1 (“hard drive”) is an allusion to disk platters spinning inside a hard drive while powered on.
Meanings
(in-plural, often, slang) Synonym of hard drive.
My server will be used to store PLEX content and offer iSCSI to my VMWARE hosts but those will be from NVME drives which. So the spinnies will just be doing SMB shares. 2023 September 7, serverboy, “Drive Spin Down Query”, in TrueNAS, archived from the original on 14 Mar 2026:
I always turned it off when I had spinnies. Bearings wear the most when you change rotational speed. If you keep the rotational speed constant, they last a very very long time. 2023 August 8, umeng2002, “Windows 'auto turn off hard disk' setting - enable or disable?”, in TechPowerUp, archived from the original on 17 Dec 2024:
And if your computer doesn't have ram, it defaults to swap disk- which on an SSD is fast, but on a spinny is slow. 2025 March 14, u/NotQuiteDeadYetPhoto, Reddit, archived from the original on 22 Mar 2025:
The downs rise steep, crowned with black fir spinnies. 1857, Charles Kingsley, “(please specify the page)”, in Two Years Ago, volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC: