Apple clears up 'disc' and 'disk' confusion

Perhaps you’d just assumed that discs and disks were variant spellings of the same word. Ha! Nothing could be further from the truth. “Disc,” you see, refers to optical media—you know, those shiny things you put under your martini glass to keep from leaving rings on your antique coffee table. Examples include CDs, DVDs, and perhaps even some day a Blu-ray bags of hurt.

Discs are also removable volumes—you can physically take them out of your computer, where they will clutter up your desk and eventually fall behind it, only to collect dust which, after years in the dark, will develop sentience and slowly begin to gnaw through your floorboards.

How does that differ from a “disk,” you might wonder? Well, a disk is a piece of magnetic media—like your computer’s hard drive or a floppy disk. In case you’re unfamiliar with floppy disks, they’re kind of like flash drives that hold half a standard MP3—and you can take them apart to create jewelry.

/yj9dchh

There you have it.

Here it is from the horse's mouth.

support.apple.com...

[edit on 2009/10/24 by GradyPhilpott]

Never really used the disc spelling even when writing about removable optical media. Now that you have pointed out the difference I am sure I will start noticing it more.
Thanks for the info.

Interesting!
So DISC is optical and DISK is magnetic.
Thanks for the tidbit.