the.com/hard drive
A spinning metal disk that remembers everything so you don't have to.
means A storage device that holds a computer's data permanently, even when the power is off.
from A straightforward compound: 'hard' distinguishes its rigid metal platters from the floppy (flexible) disks that came before, and 'drive' is older computing/engineering jargon for any mechanism that spins or moves a storage medium to read and write data — the same sense survives in 'disk drive' and 'tape drive.' So the name is really just a literal description: a drive that's hard, not floppy.
- read speed
- head floats nanometers above disk, never touches it
- crash risk
- a dust speck can wreck the whole platter
- longevity
- magnetic storage outlasts most SSDs for archiving
- origin
- first one in 1956 weighed over a ton