The mechanism that reads and writes
data on a hard disk. Hard disk drives
(HDDs) for PCs generally have seek
times of about 12 milliseconds or less.
Many disk drives improve their
performance through a technique called
caching.
There are several interface standards for
passing data between a hard disk and a
computer. The most common are IDE
and SCSI.
Hard disk drives are sometimes called
Winchester drives, Winchester being the
name of one of the first popular hard disk
drive technologies developed by IBM in
1973.
