About

Hard Drive Check sometimes called Check His Hard Drive is an internet slang catchphrase and reaction meme used to allege that someone has incriminating evidence, typically presumed to be illegal pornography, on their offline computer hard drive. While jokes about storing pornography on one's hard drive have existed on the internet for decades, memes calling for a "hard drive check" after someone shares something sus and is presumed to have a CP collection began to proliferate after the year 2010.

Origin

A May 23rd, 2005 definition for the term "hard drive" relates it to storing pornography offline, typically in a secretive manner (seen below).^[1]

On September 20th, 2013, an SNL ^[8] segment used the phrase "check his hard drive" in relation to SpongeBob. The YouTube upload gathered over 200,000 views in 9 years (seen below).

Spread

Various Twitter users used the phrase "hard drive check" or "check his hard drive" before 2013, while others alluded to how a hard drive is meant to host secretive information. Many people using the phrase "check his hard drive" before the year 2015 appear to be British.^[2][3][4]

On February 24th, 2022, a clip of English commentator Jamie Carragher saying "check his hard drive" was posted to YouTube.^[5] Soon after, the clip was popularized as a reaction video (seen below).

On September 10th, 2022, Twitter^[9] user @PhilipProudfoot posted a tweet calling for a hard drive check on King Charles, gathering over 200,000 likes in eight months (seen below, left). On April 2nd, Twitter^[10] user @SteveSuccessor called for a hard drive check on someone, gathering over 160,000 likes in a month (seen below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References