Hard Disk Drive
Hard disk drives (also called hard drives or disk drives) is the mechanism that reads and writes data on a hard disk. Hard disk drives (HDDs) for PCs generally have seek times of about 12 milliseconds or less. Many disk drives improve their performance through a technique called caching.
There are several interface standards for passing data between a hard disk and a computer. The most common are IDE and SCSI.
Hard disk drives are sometimes called Winchester drives, Winchester being the name of one of the first popular hard disk drive technologies developed by IBMin 1973.
See What’s Inside a Hard Drive? in the Did You Know … ? section of
Read Also:
- hard disk loading
A type of software piracy that occurs when hardware dealers; brick-and-mortar or Internet vendors, install an unauthorized copy of commercial software onto a computer system. In many cases consumers will not receive any manuals or original CD of the software but the hardware dealer may charge for the illegal software in the total system purchase […]
- hard disk type
A number that indicates important features of a hard disk, such as the number of platters and cylinders. However, the numbering scheme has broken down over the last few years and is no longer used by most disk drive manufacturers.
- hard drive enclosure
The casing that holds a hard drive which can be externally connected to a computer system. Also called a hard drive cage. See external hard drive.
- hard error
An error occurence in a computer system that is caused by the failure of a memory chip. Hard errors can appear like chip-level soft errors, but the difference is that the hard error is not rectified when the computer is rebooted. The solution to a hard error is to replace the memory chip or module […]
- Hard Return
A return is the process of jumping from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next line. Word processors utilize two types of returns: hard returns and soft returns. A hard return is an actual symbol inserted into the text. The hard-return symbol is usually invisible, but most word processors […]