A non-volatile storage device that reads and writes digital data using rapidly rotating magnetic platters and mechanical actuator arms. Despite the shift toward solid-state storage, these mechanical drives remain the standard for bulk data archiving in enterprise data centers due to their high capacity and low cost per terabyte.
Pull the faulty hard drive from bay four and swap in a cold spare before the RAID array degrades further.
Also heard as
- HDD
Related terms
Hard disk
A rigid magnetic platter used for non-volatile data storage inside a drive mechanism.
Storage device
A discrete hardware unit designed to record and retrieve digital data.
SATA
A common computer bus interface used to connect host bus adapters to mass storage devices.
SCSI
Small Computer System Interface is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices.