Hard Drive

As used with a computer, a hard drive is the mechanism that controls the positioning, reading, and writing of the hard disk, which provides the largest amount of data storage for the computer. Although the hard drive (sometimes referred to as the “hard disk drive”) and the hard disk are not the same thing, they are packaged as a unit, and so either term is sometimes used to refer to the whole unit. While there are several interface standards for passing data between a hard disk and a computer, the most common are IDE and SCSI.