HDD

(Hard Disk Drive or simply Hard Drive)- A term born from the fact that before mechanical platter based drives existed, there was “soft” storage like tape and floppy disks. In HDD’s, Data is stored on “hard” magnetic platters where bits can be written/erased by a header moving through the radius of a platter while it spins. The term has become so ubiquitous with general computer storage that many now use it to describe any main storage component in a system, even when the technology employed is a something different like a solid state drive. See also: SSD, Flash storage