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Hard Drives
Home > Computer Accessories > Hard Drives
Hard Drives
A hard disk drive (HDD), commonly referred to as hard drives, hard disk, or fixed disk drive,[1] is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters (like thin CDs) with magnetic surfaces. A HDD today is typically a sealed unit (except for a filtered vent hole to equalize air pressure) with fixed media. Originally, the term "hard" was temporary slang, substituting "hard" for "rigid", before these drives had an established and universally-agreed-upon name. A HDD is a rigid-disk drive although it is rarely referred to as such. By way of comparison, a floppy drive (more formally, a diskette drive) has a disc that is flexible. Today floppy drives have become obsolete as they did not hold much data and solid state devices (like USB memory sticks) developed, became cheaper and stored more nformation.
Brief History
In the 21st century, applications for HDDs have expanded to include digital video recorders, digital audio players, personal digital assistants, digital cameras and video game consoles. In 2005 the first mobile phones to include hard drives were introduced by Samsung and Nokia. The need for large-scale, reliable storage, independent of a particular device, led to the introduction of configurations such as RAID arrays, network attached storage (NAS) systems and storage area network (SAN) systems that provide efficient and reliable access to large volumes of data. all of these are now affordable and available for homes and small business as well as larger corporations.
New technology is always assisting with the development of hard drives and today hard drives of 1 or 2 terabytes are common. Realistically we do not need that much storage space and a hard drive of 250 to 500 Gigabytes is more than enough for most users.
Another fantastic move is the solid state hard drives which will have no moving parts, a bit like a larger version of a USB memory stick. Although still relatively expensive per GB this will soon change as production increases and the competition gets sorted out. I would wait and see with this one.