A
hard disk drive (
HDD),
hard disk,
hard drive
or
fixed disk[b]
is a
data storage device used for storing and
retrieving
digital information using one or more rigid rapidly
rotating disks (
platters) coated with magnetic material. The
platters are paired with
magnetic heads, usually arranged on a
moving
actuator
arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces.
[2]
Data is accessed in a
random-access manner, meaning that individual
blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in
any order and not only
sequentially. HDDs are a type of
non-volatile memory, retaining stored data even
when powered off.
Introduced by
IBM
in 1956,
[3]
HDDs became the dominant
secondary
storage device for
general-purpose computers by the
early 1960s. Continuously improved, HDDs have maintained this position into the
modern era of
servers and
personal
computers. More than 200 companies have produced HDDs historically, though
after extensive industry consolidation most current units are manufactured by
Seagate,
Toshiba, and
Western
Digital. As of 2016, HDD production (in bytes per year) is growing,
although unit shipments and sales revenues are declining. The primary competing
technology for secondary storage is
flash
memory in the form of
solid-state
drives (SSDs), which have higher data-transfer rates, higher
areal storage density, better reliability,
[4]
and much lower latency and access times.
[5][6][7][8]
While SSDs have higher cost per
bit, SSDs are replacing HDDs where speed,
power consumption, small size, and
durability are important.
[7][8]
The primary characteristics of an HDD are its capacity and
performance. Capacity
is specified in
unit prefixes corresponding to powers of 1000: a 1-
terabyte (TB)
drive has a capacity of 1,000
gigabytes (GB; where 1 gigabyte = 1 billion
bytes). Typically,
some of an HDD's capacity is unavailable to the user because it is used by the
file
system and the computer
operating
system, and possibly inbuilt redundancy for
error
correction and recovery. Performance is specified by the time required to
move the heads to a track or cylinder (average access time) plus the time it
takes for the desired sector to move under the head (average
latency, which is a function of the physical
rotational
speed in
revolutions per minute), and finally the
speed at which the data is transmitted (data rate).
The two most common
form factors for modern HDDs are 3.5-
inch, for desktop
computers, and 2.5-inch, primarily for laptops. HDDs are connected to systems
by standard
interface cables such as
PATA
(Parallel ATA),
SATA
(Serial ATA),
USB or
SAS (
Serial attached SCSI) cables. (Prepared by Lay SengKheang)