A hard disk drive (HDD) is a non-volatile, random access device for digital data. It features rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data is magnetically read from and written to the platter by read/write heads that float on a film of air above the platters.
Introduced by IBM in 1956, hard disk drives have fallen in cost and physical size over the years while dramatically increasing in capacity. Hard disk drives have been the dominant device for secondary storage of data in general purpose computers since the early 1960s. They have maintained this position because advances in their areal recording density have kept pace with the requirements for secondary storage. Today’s HDDs operate on high-speed serial interfaces; i.e., serial ATA (SATA) or serial attached SCSI (SAS).
History
Hard disk drives were introduced in 1956 as data storage for an IBM accounting computer and were developed for use with general purpose mainframe and mini computers.
Driven by areal density doubling every two to four years since their invention, HDDs have changed in many ways, a few highlights include:
- Capacity per HDD increasing from 3.75 megabytes to greater than 1 terabyte, a greater than 270-thousand-to-1 improvement.
- Size of HDD decreasing from 87.9 cubic feet (a double wide refrigerator) to 0.002 cubic feet (2
