A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk, is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating 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. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.
Maxtor Corporation was an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer. Founded in 1982, it was the third largest hard disk drive manufacturer in the world before being purchased by Seagate in 2006.
Western Digital Corporation is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including data storage devices, data center systems and cloud storage services.
Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California, United States.
Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology is a monitoring system included in computer hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). Its primary function is to detect and report various indicators of drive reliability with the intent of anticipating imminent hardware failures.
The Western Digital Raptor is a discontinued series of high performance hard disk drives produced by Western Digital first marketed in 2003. The drive occupies a niche in the enthusiast, workstation and small-server market. Traditionally, the majority of servers used hard drives featuring a SCSI interface because of their advantages in both performance and reliability over consumer-level ATA drives.
The Microdrive is a type of miniature, 1-inch hard disks produced by IBM and Hitachi. These rotational media storage devices were designed to fit in CompactFlash (CF) Type II slots.
Perpendicular recording, also known as conventional magnetic recording (CMR), is a technology for data recording on magnetic media, particularly hard disks. It was first proven advantageous in 1976 by Shun-ichi Iwasaki, then professor of the Tohoku University in Japan, and first commercially implemented in 2005. The first industry-standard demonstration showing unprecedented advantage of PMR over longitudinal magnetic recording (LMR) at nanoscale dimensions was made in 1998 at IBM Almaden Research Center in collaboration with researchers of Data Storage Systems Center (DSSC) – a National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center (ERCs) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).
In computing, a hybrid drive is a logical or physical storage device that combines a faster storage medium such as solid-state drive (SSD) with a higher-capacity hard disk drive (HDD). The intent is adding some of the speed of SSDs to the cost-effective storage capacity of traditional HDDs. The purpose of the SSD in a hybrid drive is to act as a cache for the data stored on the HDD, improving the overall performance by keeping copies of the most frequently used data on the faster SSD drive.
Deskstar was the name of a product line of computer hard disk drives. It was originally announced by IBM in October 1994. The line was continued by Hitachi, when in 2003 it bought IBM's hard disk drive division and renamed it Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. In 2012, Hitachi sold the division to Western Digital, who continued the drive product line brand as HGST Deskstar. In 2018, Western Digital began winding down the HGST brand, and as of 2020 it is defunct.
Travelstar was a brand of 2.5-inch hard disk drive (HDD) that was introduced by IBM in 1994 with the announcement of the Travelstar LP. At 12.5 mm high with two platters, they were available in 360, 540 and 720 MB capacities. Initial models were industry-leading for small form factor HDDs in terms of areal density, data transfer rates and shock tolerance (500g).
A hard disk drive failure occurs when a hard disk drive malfunctions and the stored information cannot be accessed with a properly configured computer.
In 1953, IBM recognized the immediate application for what it termed a "Random Access File" having high capacity and rapid random access at a relatively low cost. After considering technologies such as wire matrices, rod arrays, drums, drum arrays, etc., the engineers at IBM's San Jose California laboratory invented the hard disk drive. The disk drive created a new level in the computer data hierarchy, then termed Random Access Storage but today known as secondary storage, less expensive and slower than main memory but faster and more expensive than tape drives.
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functions as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is also sometimes called a semiconductor storage device, a solid-state device, or a solid-state disk, even though SSDs lack the physical spinning disks and movable read-write heads used in hard disk drives (HDDs) and floppy disks. SSD also has rich internal parallelism for data processing.
The AirPort Time Capsule is a wireless router which was sold by Apple Inc., featuring network-attached storage (NAS) and a residential gateway router, and is one of Apple's AirPort products. They are, essentially, versions of the AirPort Extreme with an internal hard drive. Apple describes it as a "Backup Appliance", designed to work in tandem with the Time Machine backup software utility introduced in Mac OS X 10.5.
The Seagate Barracuda is a series of hard disk drives and later solid state drives produced by Seagate Technology that was first introduced in 1993.
SanDisk Professional is a brand of Western Digital that produces external storage products designed and marketed for the Macintosh, creative pro, photography and A/V markets. Its USB, FireWire, eSATA, SAS, SCSI Thunderbolt, and Fibre Channel systems support all levels of audio/video production.
Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is a magnetic storage data recording technology used in hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase storage density and overall per-drive storage capacity. Conventional hard disk drives record data by writing non-overlapping magnetic tracks parallel to each other, while shingled recording writes new tracks that overlap part of the previously written magnetic track, leaving the previous track narrower and allowing higher track density. Thus, the tracks partially overlap similar to roof shingles. This approach was selected because, if the writing head is made too narrow, it cannot provide the very high fields required in the recording layer of the disk.
Ultrastar is a Western Digital brand of high performance 3.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs).
