Hard drive

A hard drive or hard disk, also known as hard disk drive or HDD, is a magnetic disk used as a primary storage device in a personal computer. Most PCs come with a hard drive built in, though the hard drive market thrives on people buying replacements or additions to their existing hard drives, or constructing a RAID storage system.

Hard drives are usually sold in "internal" and "external" variants. An internal drive is one that essentially plugs directly into a computer's internal components. An external drive can be plugged in via an external interface, like USB or Firewire. If you're not sure what type of hard drive you have, consult a hard drive identifying guide. Incorrectly tampering with a hard drive could result in data loss.

The hard drive is integral to the power and storage capacity of your computer, and the right hard drive could greatly improve your gaming experience. If you intend to upgrade the hard drive on your PC in order to improve gaming capabilities, research some worthwhile upgrades. Hard drives

While hard drives are normally found on personal computers, the PlayStation 2 was the first known home game console to feature a hard drive expansion bay, and the hard drive itself was sold with titles such as Final Fantasy XI. The Xbox was the first known home game console to feature an integrated hard drive; an 8 GB model was shipped as standard.

History
Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu, in Tokyo, conceived the idea of a magnetic disk in 1950. He later received a Japanese patent in 1952, and received an American patent dated 1958. The IBM 350, released by IBM in 1956, was the first commercial hard disk drive. It could hold 5 million 6-bit characters, equivalent to 3.75 megabytes.

In 1978, NTT released the NTT Model 801, which introduced a storage capacity of 800 MB per spindle. In 1986, the NTT GEMMY introduced 8.8 GB storage capacity and 4.4 MB/s transfer rate. In 1989, Jimmy Zhu and H. Neal Bertram from UCSD proposed exchange decoupled granular microstructure for thin film disk storage media, still used today.

In 1990, the Toshiba MK1122FC was the first HDD to use a glass hard disk drive platter, with advantages such as greater shock resistance compared to aluminium platters The same year, the Hitachi H-6587 featured 2.92 gigabytes storage, with nine 9.5-inch disks, with a transfer rate of 4.2 MB/s and speed of 4260 RPM.

In 1996, the Toshiba MK0200MAT became the thinnest 2.5-inch HDD, at 8.45 mm thickness. In 1998, the Toshiba MK2109MAF became the thinnest 2.5-inch HDD, at 6.35 mm thickness. In 1998, the Hitachi DK3E1T-91 was the first HDD to surpass 12,000 RPM speed. In 2000, the Hitachi H-65A1 and H-65A5 became the largest disk array units, with total capacity of 27 TB, including up to 73 GB per HDD.