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A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using
magnetic storage Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of data on a magnetized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetisation in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is ac ...
with one or more rigid rapidly rotating
platters The Platters was an American vocal group formed in 1952. They are one of the most successful vocal groups of the early rock and roll era. Their distinctive sound bridges the pre-rock Tin Pan Alley tradition and the new burgeoning genre. The ac ...
coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a
random-access Random access (more precisely and more generally called direct access) is the ability to access an arbitrary element of a sequence in equal time or any datum from a population of addressable elements roughly as easily and efficiently as any othe ...
manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of
non-volatile storage Non-volatile memory (NVM) or non-volatile storage is a type of computer memory that can retain stored information even after power is removed. In contrast, volatile memory needs constant power in order to retain data. Non-volatile memory typi ...
, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box. Introduced by IBM in 1956, HDDs were the dominant secondary storage device for general-purpose computers beginning in the early 1960s. HDDs maintained this position into the modern era of servers and
personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
s, though personal computing devices produced in large volume, like cell phones and tablets, rely on flash memory storage devices. More than 224 companies have produced HDDs historically, though after extensive industry consolidation most units are manufactured by Seagate,
Toshiba , commonly known as Toshiba and stylized as TOSHIBA, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, ...
, and
Western Digital Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...
. HDDs dominate the volume of storage produced (
exabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
s per year) for servers. Though production is growing slowly (by exabytes shipped), sales revenues and unit shipments are declining because
solid-state drive A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is a ...
s (SSDs) have higher data-transfer rates, higher areal storage density, somewhat better reliability, and much lower latency and access times.Hutchinson, Lee. (June 25, 2012
How SSDs conquered mobile devices and modern OSes
. Ars Technica. Retrieved January 7, 2013.
The revenues for SSDs, most of which use
NAND flash memory Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use t ...
, slightly exceeded those for HDDs in 2018. Flash storage products had more than twice the revenue of hard disk drives . Though SSDs have four to nine times higher cost per bit, they are replacing HDDs in applications where speed, power consumption, small size, high capacity and durability are important. , the cost per bit of SSDs is falling, and the price premium over HDDs has narrowed. The primary characteristics of an HDD are its capacity and performance. Capacity is specified in
unit prefix A unit prefix is a specifier or mnemonic that is prepended to units of measurement to indicate multiples or fractions of the units. Units of various sizes are commonly formed by the use of such prefixes. The prefixes of the metric system, such as ...
es corresponding to powers of : a 1-
terabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
(TB) drive has a capacity of gigabytes (GB; where 1 gigabyte = (109)
byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
s). Typically, some of an HDD's capacity is unavailable to the user because it is used by the file system and the computer
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...
, and possibly inbuilt redundancy for error correction and recovery. There can be confusion regarding storage capacity, since capacities are stated in decimal gigabytes (powers of 1000) by HDD manufacturers, whereas the most commonly used operating systems report capacities in powers of 1024, which results in a smaller number than advertised. Performance is specified as the time required to move the heads to a track or cylinder (average access time), the time it takes for the desired sector to move under the head (average latency, which is a function of the physical
rotational speed Rotational frequency (also known as rotational speed or rate of rotation) of an object rotating around an axis is the frequency of rotation of the object. Its unit is revolution per minute (rpm), cycle per second (cps), etc. The symbol fo ...
in
revolutions per minute Revolutions per minute (abbreviated rpm, RPM, rev/min, r/min, or with the notation min−1) is a unit of rotational speed or rotational frequency for rotating machines. Standards ISO 80000-3:2019 defines a unit of rotation as the dimension ...
), and finally the speed at which the data is transmitted (data rate). The two most common form factors for modern HDDs are 3.5-inch, for desktop computers, and 2.5-inch, primarily for laptops. HDDs are connected to systems by standard
interface Interface or interfacing may refer to: Academic journals * ''Interface'' (journal), by the Electrochemical Society * '' Interface, Journal of Applied Linguistics'', now merged with ''ITL International Journal of Applied Linguistics'' * '' Int ...
cables such as
PATA Pata or PATA may refer to: Places * Pata, Sulu, a Philippine municipality * Pata, Galanta District, a village in Slovakia * Pata, Central African Republic, a village * Pata village (Samoa), a village in Samoa * Pontrilas Army Training Area, a ...
(Parallel ATA),
SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...
(Serial ATA),
USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...
or SAS ( Serial Attached SCSI) cables.


History

The first production IBM hard disk drive, the 350 disk storage, shipped in 1957 as a component of the IBM 305 RAMAC system. It was approximately the size of two medium-sized refrigerators and stored five million six-bit characters (3.75 megabytes) on a stack of 52 disks (100 surfaces used). The 350 had a single arm with two read/write heads, one facing up and the other down, that moved both horizontally between a pair of adjacent platters and vertically from one pair of platters to a second set. Variants of the IBM 350 were the
IBM 355 IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible fo ...
,
IBM 7300 IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible fo ...
and
IBM 1405 IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible fo ...
. In 1961 IBM announced, and in 1962 shipped, the IBM 1301 disk storage unit, which superseded the IBM 350 and similar drives. The 1301 consisted of one (for Model 1) or two (for model 2) modules, each containing 25 platters, each platter about thick and in diameter. While the earlier IBM disk drives used only two read/write heads per arm, the 1301 used an array of 48 heads (comb), each array moving horizontally as a single unit, one head per surface used. Cylinder-mode read/write operations were supported, and the heads flew about 250 micro-inches (about 6 µm) above the platter surface. Motion of the head array depended upon a binary adder system of hydraulic actuators which assured repeatable positioning. The 1301 cabinet was about the size of three home refrigerators placed side by side, storing the equivalent of about 21 million eight-bit bytes per module. Access time was about a quarter of a second. Also in 1962, IBM introduced the model 1311 disk drive, which was about the size of a washing machine and stored two million characters on a removable
disk pack Disk packs and disk cartridges were early forms of removable media for computer data storage, introduced in the 1960s. Disk pack A disk pack is a layered grouping of hard disk platters (circular, rigid discs coated with a magnetic data storage ...
. Users could buy additional packs and interchange them as needed, much like reels of magnetic tape. Later models of removable pack drives, from IBM and others, became the norm in most computer installations and reached capacities of 300 megabytes by the early 1980s. Non-removable HDDs were called "fixed disk" drives. In 1963 IBM introduced the 1302, with twice the track capacity and twice as many tracks per cylinder as the 1301. The 1302 had one (for Model 1) or two (for Model 2) modules, each containing a separate comb for the first 250 tracks and the last 250 tracks. Some high-performance HDDs were manufactured with one head per track, ''e.g.'', Burroughs B-475 in 1964, IBM 2305 in 1970, so that no time was lost physically moving the heads to a track and the only latency was the time for the desired block of data to rotate into position under the head. Known as fixed-head or head-per-track disk drives, they were very expensive and are no longer in production. In 1973, IBM introduced a new type of HDD code-named " Winchester". Its primary distinguishing feature was that the disk heads were not withdrawn completely from the stack of disk platters when the drive was powered down. Instead, the heads were allowed to "land" on a special area of the disk surface upon spin-down, "taking off" again when the disk was later powered on. This greatly reduced the cost of the head actuator mechanism, but precluded removing just the disks from the drive as was done with the disk packs of the day. Instead, the first models of "Winchester technology" drives featured a removable disk module, which included both the disk pack and the head assembly, leaving the actuator motor in the drive upon removal. Later "Winchester" drives abandoned the removable media concept and returned to non-removable platters. In 1974 IBM introduced the swinging arm actuator, made feasible because the Winchester recording heads function well when skewed to the recorded tracks. The simple design of the IBM GV (Gulliver) drive, invented at IBM's UK Hursley Labs, became IBM's most licensed electro-mechanical invention of all time, the actuator and filtration system being adopted in the 1980s eventually for all HDDs, and still universal nearly 40 years and 10 Billion arms later. Like the first removable pack drive, the first "Winchester" drives used platters in diameter. In 1978 IBM introduced a swing arm drive, the IBM 0680 (Piccolo), with eight inch platters, exploring the possibility that smaller platters might offer advantages. Other eight inch drives followed, then drives, sized to replace the contemporary
floppy disk drive A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...
s. The latter were primarily intended for the then fledgling personal computer (PC) market. Over time, as recording densities were greatly increased, further reductions in disk diameter to 3.5" and 2.5" were found to be optimum. Powerful rare earth magnet materials became affordable during this period, and were complementary to the swing arm actuator design to make possible the compact form factors of modern HDDs. As the 1980s began, HDDs were a rare and very expensive additional feature in PCs, but by the late 1980s their cost had been reduced to the point where they were standard on all but the cheapest computers. Most HDDs in the early 1980s were sold to PC end users as an external, add-on subsystem. The subsystem was not sold under the drive manufacturer's name but under the subsystem manufacturer's name such as
Corvus Systems Corvus Systems was a computer technology company that offered, at various points in its history, computer hardware, software, and complete PC systems. History ''Corvus'' was founded by Michael D'Addio and Mark Hahn in 1979. This San Jose, Si ...
and Tallgrass Technologies, or under the PC system manufacturer's name such as the
Apple ProFile The ProFile (codenamed Pippin) was the first hard disk drive produced by Apple Computer, initially for use with the Apple III personal computer. The original model had a formatted capacity of 5 MB and connected to a special interface card that p ...
. The
IBM PC/XT The IBM Personal Computer XT (model 5160, often shortened to PC/XT) is the second computer in the IBM Personal Computer line, released on March 8, 1983. Except for the addition of a built-in Hard disk drive, hard drive and extra expansion slots, ...
in 1983 included an internal 10 MB HDD, and soon thereafter internal HDDs proliferated on personal computers. External HDDs remained popular for much longer on the
Apple Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
. Many Macintosh computers made between 1986 and 1998 featured a SCSI port on the back, making external expansion simple. Older compact Macintosh computers did not have user-accessible hard drive bays (indeed, the Macintosh 128K,
Macintosh 512K The Macintosh 512K is a personal computer that was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from September 1984 to April 1986. It is the first update to the original Macintosh 128K. It was virtually identical to the previous Macint ...
, and
Macintosh Plus The Macintosh Plus computer is the third model in the Macintosh line, introduced on January 16, 1986, two years after the original Macintosh and a little more than a year after the Macintosh 512K, with a price tag of US$2,599. As an evolutiona ...
did not feature a hard drive bay at all), so on those models external SCSI disks were the only reasonable option for expanding upon any internal storage. HDD improvements have been driven by increasing
areal density The area density (also known as areal density, surface density, superficial density, areic density, mass thickness, column density, or density thickness) of a two-dimensional object is calculated as the mass per unit area. The SI derived unit is ...
, listed in the table above. Applications expanded through the 2000s, from the mainframe computers of the late 1950s to most
mass storage In computing, mass storage refers to the storage of large amounts of data in a persisting and machine-readable fashion. In general, the term is used as large in relation to contemporaneous hard disk drives, but it has been used large in relati ...
applications including computers and consumer applications such as storage of entertainment content. In the 2000s and 2010s, NAND began supplanting HDDs in applications requiring portability or high performance. NAND performance is improving faster than HDDs, and applications for HDDs are eroding. In 2018, the largest hard drive had a capacity of 15 TB, while the largest capacity SSD had a capacity of 100 TB. , HDDs were forecast to reach 100 TB capacities around 2025, but the expected pace of improvement was pared back to 50 TB by 2026. Smaller form factors, 1.8-inches and below, were discontinued around 2010. The cost of solid-state storage (NAND), represented by Moore's law, is improving faster than HDDs. NAND has a higher price elasticity of demand than HDDs, and this drives market growth. During the late 2000s and 2010s, the
product life cycle In industry, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the engineering, design and manufacture, as well as the service and disposal of manufactured products. PLM ...
of HDDs entered a mature phase, and slowing sales may indicate the onset of the declining phase. The 2011 Thailand floods damaged the manufacturing plants and impacted hard disk drive cost adversely between 2011 and 2013. In 2019,
Western Digital Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...
closed its last Malaysian HDD factory due to decreasing demand, to focus on SSD production. All three remaining HDD manufacturers have had decreasing demand for their HDDs since 2014.


Technology


Magnetic recording

A modern HDD records data by magnetizing a thin film of
ferromagnetic material Ferromagnetism is a property of certain materials (such as iron) which results in a large observed magnetic permeability, and in many cases a large magnetic coercivity allowing the material to form a permanent magnet. Ferromagnetic materials ...
on both sides of a disk. Sequential changes in the direction of magnetization represent binary data
bit The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represente ...
s. The data is read from the disk by detecting the transitions in magnetization. User data is encoded using an encoding scheme, such as
run-length limited Run-length limited or RLL coding is a line coding technique that is used to send arbitrary data over a communications channel with bandwidth limits. RLL codes are defined by four main parameters: ''m'', ''n'', ''d'', ''k''. The first two, ''m'' ...
encoding, which determines how the data is represented by the magnetic transitions. A typical HDD design consists of a ' that holds flat circular disks, called
platters The Platters was an American vocal group formed in 1952. They are one of the most successful vocal groups of the early rock and roll era. Their distinctive sound bridges the pre-rock Tin Pan Alley tradition and the new burgeoning genre. The ac ...
, which hold the recorded data. The platters are made from a non-magnetic material, usually aluminum alloy, glass, or ceramic. They are coated with a shallow layer of magnetic material typically 10–20 nm in depth, with an outer layer of carbon for protection. For reference, a standard piece of copy paper is thick. The platters in contemporary HDDs are spun at speeds varying from 4,200 
RPM Revolutions per minute (abbreviated rpm, RPM, rev/min, r/min, or with the notation min−1) is a unit of rotational speed or rotational frequency for rotating machines. Standards ISO 80000-3:2019 defines a unit of rotation as the dimensionl ...
in energy-efficient portable devices, to 15,000 rpm for high-performance servers. The first HDDs spun at 1,200 rpm and, for many years, 3,600 rpm was the norm. , the platters in most consumer-grade HDDs spin at 5,400 or 7,200 RPM. Information is written to and read from a platter as it rotates past devices called read-and-write heads that are positioned to operate very close to the magnetic surface, with their flying height often in the range of tens of nanometers. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify the magnetization of the material passing immediately under it. In modern drives, there is one head for each magnetic platter surface on the spindle, mounted on a common arm. An actuator arm (or access arm) moves the heads on an arc (roughly radially) across the platters as they spin, allowing each head to access almost the entire surface of the platter as it spins. The arm is moved using a
voice coil A voice coil (consisting of a former, collar, and winding) is the coil of wire attached to the apex of a loudspeaker cone. It provides the motive force to the cone by the reaction of a magnetic field to the current passing through it. The te ...
actuator or in some older designs a
stepper motor A stepper motor, also known as step motor or stepping motor, is a brushless DC electric motor that divides a full rotation into a number of equal steps. The motor's position can be commanded to move and hold at one of these steps without any posi ...
. Early hard disk drives wrote data at some constant bits per second, resulting in all tracks having the same amount of data per track but modern drives (since the 1990s) use
zone bit recording In computer storage, zone bit recording (ZBR) is a method used by disk drives to optimise the tracks for increased data capacity. It does this by placing more sectors per zone on outer tracks than on inner tracks. This contrasts with other approach ...
– increasing the write speed from inner to outer zone and thereby storing more data per track in the outer zones. In modern drives, the small size of the magnetic regions creates the danger that their magnetic state might be lost because of thermal effects⁠ ⁠— thermally induced magnetic instability which is commonly known as the "
superparamagnetic limit Superparamagnetism is a form of magnetism which appears in small ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic nanoparticles. In sufficiently small nanoparticles, magnetization can randomly flip direction under the influence of temperature. The typical time betwe ...
". To counter this, the platters are coated with two parallel magnetic layers, separated by a three-atom layer of the non-magnetic element
ruthenium Ruthenium is a chemical element with the symbol Ru and atomic number 44. It is a rare transition metal belonging to the platinum group of the periodic table. Like the other metals of the platinum group, ruthenium is inert to most other chemical ...
, and the two layers are magnetized in opposite orientation, thus reinforcing each other. Another technology used to overcome thermal effects to allow greater recording densities is
perpendicular recording Perpendicular recording (or perpendicular magnetic recording, PMR), also known as conventional magnetic recording (CMR), is a technology for data recording on magnetic media, particularly hard disks. It was first proven advantageous in 1976 by S ...
, first shipped in 2005, and used in certain HDDs. In 2004, a higher-density recording media was introduced, consisting of coupled soft and hard magnetic layers. So-called ''
exchange spring media Exchange spring media (also exchange coupled composite media or ECC) is a magnetic storage technology for hard disk drives that allows to increase the storage density in magnetic recording. The idea, proposed in 2004 by Suess et al., is that the rec ...
'' magnetic storage technology, also known as ''exchange coupled composite media'', allows good writability due to the write-assist nature of the soft layer. However, the thermal stability is determined only by the hardest layer and not influenced by the soft layer.


Components

A typical HDD has two electric motors: a spindle motor that spins the disks and an actuator (motor) that positions the read/write head assembly across the spinning disks. The disk motor has an external rotor attached to the disks; the stator windings are fixed in place. Opposite the actuator at the end of the head support arm is the read-write head; thin printed-circuit cables connect the read-write heads to
amplifier An amplifier, electronic amplifier or (informally) amp is an electronic device that can increase the magnitude of a signal (a time-varying voltage or current). It may increase the power significantly, or its main effect may be to boost t ...
electronics mounted at the pivot of the actuator. The head support arm is very light, but also stiff; in modern drives, acceleration at the head reaches 550 ''g''. The ' is a permanent magnet and
moving coil A magnetic cartridge, more commonly called a phonograph cartridge or phono cartridge or (colloquially) a pickup, is an electromechanical transducer that is used to play records on a turntable. The cartridge contains a removable or permanently ...
motor that swings the heads to the desired position. A metal plate supports a squat neodymium-iron-boron (NIB) high-flux
magnet A magnet is a material or object that produces a magnetic field. This magnetic field is invisible but is responsible for the most notable property of a magnet: a force that pulls on other ferromagnetic materials, such as iron, steel, nicke ...
. Beneath this plate is the moving coil, often referred to as the ''
voice coil A voice coil (consisting of a former, collar, and winding) is the coil of wire attached to the apex of a loudspeaker cone. It provides the motive force to the cone by the reaction of a magnetic field to the current passing through it. The te ...
'' by analogy to the coil in
loudspeaker A loudspeaker (commonly referred to as a speaker or speaker driver) is an electroacoustic transducer that converts an electrical audio signal into a corresponding sound. A ''speaker system'', also often simply referred to as a "speaker" or ...
s, which is attached to the actuator hub, and beneath that is a second NIB magnet, mounted on the bottom plate of the motor (some drives have only one magnet). The voice coil itself is shaped rather like an arrowhead and is made of doubly coated copper magnet wire. The inner layer is insulation, and the outer is thermoplastic, which bonds the coil together after it is wound on a form, making it self-supporting. The portions of the coil along the two sides of the arrowhead (which point to the center of the actuator bearing) then interact with the magnetic field of the fixed magnet. Current flowing radially outward along one side of the arrowhead and radially inward on the other produces the tangential force. If the magnetic field were uniform, each side would generate opposing forces that would cancel each other out. Therefore, the surface of the magnet is half north pole and half south pole, with the radial dividing line in the middle, causing the two sides of the coil to see opposite magnetic fields and produce forces that add instead of canceling. Currents along the top and bottom of the coil produce radial forces that do not rotate the head. The HDD's electronics control the movement of the actuator and the rotation of the disk and perform reads and writes on demand from the
disk controller {{unreferenced, date=May 2010 The disk controller is the controller circuit which enables the CPU to communicate with a hard disk, floppy disk or other kind of disk drive. It also provides an interface between the disk drive and the bus conne ...
. Feedback of the drive electronics is accomplished by means of special segments of the disk dedicated to
servo Servo may refer to: Mechanisms * Servomechanism, or servo, a device used to provide control of a desired operation through the use of feedback ** AI servo, an autofocus mode ** Electrohydraulic servo valve, an electrically operated valve that c ...
feedback. These are either complete concentric circles (in the case of dedicated servo technology) or segments interspersed with real data (in the case of embedded servo, otherwise known as sector servo technology). The servo feedback optimizes the signal-to-noise ratio of the GMR sensors by adjusting the voice coil motor to rotate the arm. A more modern servo system also employs milli and/or micro actuators to more accurately position the read/write heads. The spinning of the disks uses fluid-bearing spindle motors. Modern disk firmware is capable of scheduling reads and writes efficiently on the platter surfaces and remapping sectors of the media that have failed.


Error rates and handling

Modern drives make extensive use of
error correction code In computing, telecommunication, information theory, and coding theory, an error correction code, sometimes error correcting code, (ECC) is used for controlling errors in data over unreliable or noisy communication channels. The central idea is ...
s (ECCs), particularly Reed–Solomon error correction. These techniques store extra bits, determined by mathematical formulas, for each block of data; the extra bits allow many errors to be corrected invisibly. The extra bits themselves take up space on the HDD, but allow higher recording densities to be employed without causing uncorrectable errors, resulting in much larger storage capacity. For example, a typical 1  TB hard disk with 512-byte sectors provides additional capacity of about 93  GB for the ECC data. In the newest drives, , low-density parity-check codes (LDPC) were supplanting Reed–Solomon; LDPC codes enable performance close to the
Shannon Limit In information theory, the noisy-channel coding theorem (sometimes Shannon's theorem or Shannon's limit), establishes that for any given degree of noise contamination of a communication channel, it is possible to communicate discrete data (di ...
and thus provide the highest storage density available. Typical hard disk drives attempt to "remap" the data in a physical sector that is failing to a spare physical sector provided by the drive's "spare sector pool" (also called "reserve pool"), while relying on the ECC to recover stored data while the number of errors in a bad sector is still low enough. The S.M.A.R.T (
Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T., often written as SMART) is a monitoring system included in computer hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). Its primary function is to detect and report various indicat ...
) feature counts the total number of errors in the entire HDD fixed by ECC (although not on all hard drives as the related S.M.A.R.T attributes "Hardware ECC Recovered" and "Soft ECC Correction" are not consistently supported), and the total number of performed sector remappings, as the occurrence of many such errors may predict an
HDD failure A hard disk drive failure occurs when a hard disk drive malfunctions and the stored information cannot be accessed with a properly configured computer. A hard disk failure may occur in the course of normal operation, or due to an external facto ...
. The "No-ID Format", developed by IBM in the mid-1990s, contains information about which sectors are bad and where remapped sectors have been located. Only a tiny fraction of the detected errors end up as not correctable. Examples of specified uncorrected bit read error rates include: *2013 specifications for enterprise SAS disk drives state the error rate to be one uncorrected bit read error in every 1016 bits read, *2018 specifications for consumer SATA hard drives state the error rate to be one uncorrected bit read error in every 1014 bits. Within a given manufacturers model the uncorrected bit error rate is typically the same regardless of capacity of the drive. The worst type of errors are
silent data corruption Silent may mean any of the following: People with the name * Silent George, George Stone (outfielder) (1876–1945), American Major League Baseball outfielder and batting champion * Brandon Silent (born 1973), South African former footballer * C ...
s which are errors undetected by the disk firmware or the host operating system; some of these errors may be caused by hard disk drive malfunctions while others originate elsewhere in the connection between the drive and the host.


Development

The rate of areal density advancement was similar to Moore's law (doubling every two years) through 2010: 60% per year during 1988–1996, 100% during 1996–2003 and 30% during 2003–2010. Speaking in 1997,
Gordon Moore Gordon Earle Moore (born January 3, 1929) is an American businessman, engineer, and the co-founder and chairman emeritus of Intel Corporation. He is also the original proponent of Moore's law. As of March 2021, Moore's net worth is repor ...
called the increase "flabbergasting", while observing later that growth cannot continue forever. Price improvement decelerated to −12% per year during 2010–2017, as the growth of areal density slowed. The rate of advancement for areal density slowed to 10% per year during 2010–2016, and there was difficulty in migrating from perpendicular recording to newer technologies. As bit cell size decreases, more data can be put onto a single drive platter. In 2013, a production desktop 3 TB HDD (with four platters) would have had an areal density of about 500 Gbit/in2 which would have amounted to a bit cell comprising about 18 magnetic grains (11 by 1.6 grains). Since the mid-2000s areal density progress has been challenged by a superparamagnetic trilemma involving grain size, grain magnetic strength and ability of the head to write. In order to maintain acceptable signal to noise smaller grains are required; smaller grains may self-reverse (
electrothermal instability __NOTOC__ The electrothermal instability (also known as ionization instability, non-equilibrium instability or Velikhov instability in the literature) is a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instability appearing in magnetized non-thermal plasmas used ...
) unless their magnetic strength is increased, but known write head materials are unable to generate a strong enough magnetic field sufficient to write the medium in the increasingly smaller space taken by grains. Magnetic storage technologies are being developed to address this trilemma, and compete with flash memory–based
solid-state drive A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is a ...
s (SSDs). In 2013, Seagate introduced
shingled magnetic recording Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is a magnetic storage data recording technology used in hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase storage density and overall per-drive storage capacity. Conventional hard disk drives record data by writing non-overl ...
(SMR), intended as something of a "stopgap" technology between PMR and Seagate's intended successor
heat-assisted magnetic recording Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) (pronounced "''hammer")'' is a magnetic storage technology for greatly increasing the amount of data that can be stored on a magnetic device such as a hard disk drive by temporarily heating the disk materia ...
(HAMR), SMR utilises overlapping tracks for increased data density, at the cost of design complexity and lower data access speeds (particularly write speeds and random access 4k speeds). By contrast,
HGST HGST, Inc. (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services. It was initially a subsidiary of Hitachi, formed through its acquisition of IBM's disk d ...
(now part of
Western Digital Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...
) focused on developing ways to seal
helium Helium (from el, ἥλιος, helios, lit=sun) is a chemical element with the symbol He and atomic number 2. It is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, inert, monatomic gas and the first in the noble gas group in the periodic table. ...
-filled drives instead of the usual filtered air. Since
turbulence In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is fluid motion characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and flow velocity. It is in contrast to a laminar flow, which occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between ...
and
friction Friction is the force resisting the relative motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, and material elements sliding against each other. There are several types of friction: *Dry friction is a force that opposes the relative lateral motion of ...
are reduced, higher areal densities can be achieved due to using a smaller track width, and the energy dissipated due to friction is lower as well, resulting in a lower power draw. Furthermore, more platters can be fit into the same enclosure space, although helium gas is notoriously difficult to prevent escaping. Thus, helium drives are completely sealed and do not have a breather port, unlike their air-filled counterparts. Other recording technologies are either under research or have been commercially implemented to increase areal density, including Seagate's
heat-assisted magnetic recording Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) (pronounced "''hammer")'' is a magnetic storage technology for greatly increasing the amount of data that can be stored on a magnetic device such as a hard disk drive by temporarily heating the disk materia ...
(HAMR). HAMR requires a different architecture with redesigned media and read/write heads, new lasers, and new near-field optical transducers. HAMR is expected to ship commercially in late 2020 or 2021. Technical issues delayed the introduction of HAMR by a decade, from earlier projections of 2009, 2015, 2016, and the first half of 2019. Some drives have adopted dual independent actuator arms to increase read/write speeds and compete with SSDs. HAMR's planned successor, bit-patterned recording (BPR), has been removed from the roadmaps of Western Digital and Seagate. Western Digital's microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), also referred to as energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR), was sampled in 2020, with the first EAMR drive, the Ultrastar HC550, shipping in late 2020.
Two-dimensional magnetic recording Two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) is a technology introduced in 2017 in hard disk drives (HDD) used for computer data storage. Most of the world's data is recorded on HDDs, and there is continuous pressure on manufacturers to create greate ...
(TDMR) and "current perpendicular to plane"
giant magnetoresistance Giant magnetoresistance (GMR) is a quantum mechanical magnetoresistance effect observed in multilayers composed of alternating ferromagnetic and non-magnetic conductive layers. The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Albert Fert and Peter G ...
(CPP/GMR) heads have appeared in research papers. A 3D-actuated vacuum drive (3DHD) concept has been proposed. Depending upon assumptions on feasibility and timing of these technologies, Seagate forecasts that areal density will grow 20% per year during 2020–2034.


Capacity

The highest-capacity HDDs shipping commercially in 2022 are 20 TB. The capacity of a hard disk drive, as reported by an operating system to the end user, is smaller than the amount stated by the manufacturer for several reasons, e.g., the operating system using some space, use of some space for data redundancy, space use for file system structures. Confusion of
decimal prefix A metric prefix is a unit prefix that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a multiple or submultiple of the unit. All metric prefixes used today are decadic. Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to any unit symbol. The pre ...
es and
binary prefix A binary prefix is a unit prefix for multiples of units. It is most often used in data processing, data transmission, and digital information, principally in association with the bit and the byte, to indicate multiplication by a power of& ...
es can also lead to errors.


Calculation

Modern hard disk drives appear to their host controller as a contiguous set of logical blocks, and the gross drive capacity is calculated by multiplying the number of blocks by the block size. This information is available from the manufacturer's product specification, and from the drive itself through use of operating system functions that invoke low-level drive commands. Older IBM and compatible drives, e.g.,
IBM 3390 IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible fo ...
, using the CKD record format have variable length records; such drive capacity calculations must take into account the characteristics of the records. Some newer DASD simulate CKD, and the same capacity formulae apply. The gross capacity of older sector-oriented HDDs is calculated as the product of the number of cylinders per recording zone, the number of bytes per sector (most commonly 512), and the count of
zones Zone or The Zone may refer to: Places Climate and altitude zones * Death zone (originally the lethal zone), altitudes above a certain point where the amount of oxygen is insufficient to sustain human life for an extended time span * Frigid zone, ...
of the drive. Some modern SATA drives also report
cylinder-head-sector Cylinder-head-sector (CHS) is an early method for giving addresses to each physical block of data on a hard disk drive. It is a 3D-coordinate system made out of a vertical coordinate ''head'', a horizontal (or radial) coordinate ''cylinder'', a ...
(CHS) capacities, but these are not physical parameters because the reported values are constrained by historic operating system interfaces. The C/H/S scheme has been replaced by
logical block addressing Logical block addressing (LBA) is a common scheme used for specifying the location of blocks of data stored on computer storage devices, generally secondary storage systems such as hard disk drives. LBA is a particularly simple linear address ...
(LBA), a simple linear addressing scheme that locates blocks by an integer index, which starts at LBA 0 for the first block and increments thereafter. When using the C/H/S method to describe modern large drives, the number of heads is often set to 64, although a typical modern hard disk drive has between one and four platters. In modern HDDs, spare capacity for defect management is not included in the published capacity; however, in many early HDDs a certain number of sectors were reserved as spares, thereby reducing the capacity available to the operating system. Furthermore, many HDDs store their firmware in a reserved service zone, which is typically not accessible by the user, and is not included in the capacity calculation. For
RAID Raid, RAID or Raids may refer to: Attack * Raid (military), a sudden attack behind the enemy's lines without the intention of holding ground * Corporate raid, a type of hostile takeover in business * Panty raid, a prankish raid by male college ...
subsystems, data integrity and fault-tolerance requirements also reduce the realized capacity. For example, a RAID 1 array has about half the total capacity as a result of data mirroring, while a RAID 5 array with drives loses of capacity (which equals to the capacity of a single drive) due to storing parity information. RAID subsystems are multiple drives that appear to be one drive or more drives to the user, but provide fault tolerance. Most RAID vendors use
checksum A checksum is a small-sized block of data derived from another block of digital data for the purpose of detecting errors that may have been introduced during its transmission or storage. By themselves, checksums are often used to verify data ...
s to improve data integrity at the block level. Some vendors design systems using HDDs with sectors of 520 bytes to contain 512 bytes of user data and eight checksum bytes, or by using separate 512-byte sectors for the checksum data. Some systems may use hidden
partitions Partition may refer to: Computing Hardware * Disk partitioning, the division of a hard disk drive * Memory partition, a subdivision of a computer's memory, usually for use by a single job Software * Partition (database), the division of a ...
for system recovery, reducing the capacity available to the end user without knowledge of special disk partitioning utilities like
diskpart In computing, diskpart is a command-line disk partitioning utility included in Windows 2000 and later Microsoft operating systems, replacing its predecessor, fdisk. The command is also available in ReactOS. Overview The diskpart is a utility ...
in
Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...
.


Formatting

Data is stored on a hard drive in a series of logical blocks. Each block is delimited by markers identifying its start and end, error detecting and correcting information, and space between blocks to allow for minor timing variations. These blocks often contained 512 bytes of usable data, but other sizes have been used. As drive density increased, an initiative known as
Advanced Format Advanced Format (AF) is any disk sector format used to store data on magnetic disks in hard disk drives (HDDs) that exceeds 512, 520, or 528 bytes per sector, such as the 4096, 4112, 4160, and 4224-byte (4  KB) sectors of an Advanced Format ...
extended the block size to 4096 bytes of usable data, with a resulting significant reduction in the amount of disk space used for block headers, error checking data, and spacing. The process of initializing these logical blocks on the physical disk platters is called ''low-level formatting'', which is usually performed at the factory and is not normally changed in the field. ''High-level formatting'' writes data structures used by the operating system to organize data files on the disk. This includes writing
partition Partition may refer to: Computing Hardware * Disk partitioning, the division of a hard disk drive * Memory partition, a subdivision of a computer's memory, usually for use by a single job Software * Partition (database), the division of a ...
and file system structures into selected logical blocks. For example, some of the disk space will be used to hold a directory of disk file names and a list of logical blocks associated with a particular file. Examples of partition mapping scheme include Master boot record (MBR) and
GUID Partition Table The GUID Partition Table (GPT) is a standard for the layout of partition tables of a physical computer storage device, such as a hard disk drive or solid-state drive, using universally unique identifiers, which are also known as globally unique i ...
(GPT). Examples of data structures stored on disk to retrieve files include the File Allocation Table (FAT) in the
DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...
file system and inodes in many
UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...
file systems, as well as other operating system data structures (also known as metadata). As a consequence, not all the space on an HDD is available for user files, but this system overhead is usually small compared with user data.


Units

In the early days of computing the total capacity of HDDs was specified in 7 to 9 decimal digits frequently truncated with the idiom ''millions''. By the 1970s, the total capacity of HDDs was given by manufacturers using SI decimal prefixes such as megabytes (1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes), gigabytes (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) and
terabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
s (1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes). However, capacities of
memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered ...
are usually quoted using a binary interpretation of the prefixes, i.e. using powers of 1024 instead of 1000. Software reports hard disk drive or memory capacity in different forms using either decimal or binary prefixes. The Microsoft Windows family of operating systems uses the binary convention when reporting storage capacity, so an HDD offered by its manufacturer as a 1 TB drive is reported by these operating systems as a 931 GB HDD.
Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...
10.6 ("
Snow Leopard The snow leopard (''Panthera uncia''), also known as the ounce, is a felid in the genus '' Panthera'' native to the mountain ranges of Central and South Asia. It is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List because the global population is es ...
") uses decimal convention when reporting HDD capacity. The default behavior of the
command-line utility A console application is a computer program designed to be used via a text-only computer interface, such as a text terminal, the command-line interface of some operating systems (Unix, DOS, etc.) or the text-based interface included with most gr ...
on Linux is to report the HDD capacity as a number of 1024-byte units. The difference between the decimal and binary prefix interpretation caused some consumer confusion and led to class action suits against HDD manufacturers. The plaintiffs argued that the use of decimal prefixes effectively misled consumers while the defendants denied any wrongdoing or liability, asserting that their marketing and advertising complied in all respects with the law and that no class member sustained any damages or injuries. In 2020, a California court ruled that use of the decimal prefixes with a decimal meaning was not misleading.


Form factors

IBM's first hard disk drive, the IBM 350, used a stack of fifty 24-inch platters, stored 3.75 MB of data (approximately the size of one modern digital picture), and was of a size comparable to two large refrigerators. In 1962, IBM introduced its model 1311 disk, which used six 14-inch (nominal size) platters in a removable pack and was roughly the size of a washing machine. This became a standard platter size for many years, used also by other manufacturers. The
IBM 2314 IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible ...
used platters of the same size in an eleven-high pack and introduced the "drive in a drawer" layout. sometimes called the"pizza oven", although the "drawer" was not the complete drive. Into the 1970s HDDs were offered in standalone cabinets of varying dimensions containing from one to four HDDs. Beginning in the late 1960s drives were offered that fit entirely into a chassis that would mount in a
19-inch rack A 19-inch rack is a standardized frame or enclosure for mounting multiple electronic equipment modules. Each module has a front panel that is wide. The 19 inch dimension includes the edges or "ears" that protrude from each side of the equ ...
. Digital's
RK05 Digital Equipment Corporation's RK05 is a disk drive whose removable disk pack can hold about 2.5 megabytes of data. Introduced 1972, it is similar to IBM's 1964-introduced 2310, and uses a disk pack similar to IBM's 2315 disk pack, although ...
and RL01 were early examples using single 14-inch platters in removable packs, the entire drive fitting in a 10.5-inch-high rack space (six rack units). In the mid-to-late 1980s the similarly sized
Fujitsu Eagle The Fujitsu M2351 "Eagle" was a hard disk drive with an SMD interface that was used on many servers in the mid-1980s. It offered an unformatted capacity of 470 MBNet capacity available would range between 330-380 MB, depending on formatting in ...
, which used (coincidentally) 10.5-inch platters, was a popular product. With increasing sales of microcomputers having built in floppy-disk drives (FDDs), HDDs that would fit to the FDD mountings became desirable. Starting with the Shugart Associates SA1000, HDD ''form factors'' initially followed those of 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disk drives. Although referred to by these nominal sizes, the actual sizes for those three drives respectively are 9.5", 5.75" and 4" wide. Because there were no smaller floppy disk drives, smaller HDD form factors such as 2½-inch drives (actually 2.75" wide) developed from product offerings or industry standards. , 2½-inch and 3½-inch hard disks are the most popular sizes. By 2009, all manufacturers had discontinued the development of new products for the 1.3-inch, 1-inch and 0.85-inch form factors due to falling prices of flash memory, which has no moving parts. While nominal sizes are in inches, actual dimensions are specified in millimeters.


Performance characteristics

The factors that limit the time to access the data on an HDD are mostly related to the mechanical nature of the rotating disks and moving heads, including: *
Seek time Higher performance in hard disk drives comes from devices which have better performance characteristics. These performance characteristics can be grouped into two categories: access time and data transfer time (or rate). Access time The ''access ...
is a measure of how long it takes the head assembly to travel to the track of the disk that contains data. * Rotational latency is incurred because the desired
disk sector In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. Each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, traditionally 512 bytes for hard disk drives (HDDs) and 2048 bytes for CD-ROMs an ...
may not be directly under the head when data transfer is requested. Average rotational latency is shown in the table, based on the statistical relation that the average latency is one-half the rotational period. * The bit rate or data transfer rate (once the head is in the right position) creates delay which is a function of the number of blocks transferred; typically relatively small, but can be quite long with the transfer of large contiguous files. Delay may also occur if the drive disks are stopped to save energy.
Defragmentation In the maintenance of file systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the degree of fragmentation. It does this by physically organizing the contents of the mass storage device used to store files into the smallest number of contigu ...
is a procedure used to minimize delay in retrieving data by moving related items to physically proximate areas on the disk. Some computer operating systems perform defragmentation automatically. Although automatic defragmentation is intended to reduce access delays, performance will be temporarily reduced while the procedure is in progress. Time to access data can be improved by increasing rotational speed (thus reducing latency) or by reducing the time spent seeking. Increasing areal density increases
throughput Network throughput (or just throughput, when in context) refers to the rate of message delivery over a communication channel, such as Ethernet or packet radio, in a communication network. The data that these messages contain may be delivered ove ...
by increasing data rate and by increasing the amount of data under a set of heads, thereby potentially reducing seek activity for a given amount of data. The time to access data has not kept up with throughput increases, which themselves have not kept up with growth in bit density and storage capacity.


Latency


Data transfer rate

, a typical 7,200-rpm desktop HDD has a sustained "disk-to-
buffer Buffer may refer to: Science * Buffer gas, an inert or nonflammable gas * Buffer solution, a solution used to prevent changes in pH * Buffering agent, the weak acid or base in a buffer solution * Lysis buffer, in cell biology * Metal ion buffer * ...
" data transfer rate up to 1,030 
Mbit/s In telecommunications, data-transfer rate is the average number of bits ( bitrate), characters or symbols ( baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are mu ...
. This rate depends on the track location; the rate is higher for data on the outer tracks (where there are more data sectors per rotation) and lower toward the inner tracks (where there are fewer data sectors per rotation); and is generally somewhat higher for 10,000-rpm drives. A current widely used standard for the "buffer-to-computer" interface is 3.0 
Gbit/s In telecommunications, data-transfer rate is the average number of bits ( bitrate), characters or symbols ( baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are mu ...
SATA, which can send about 300 megabyte/s (10-bit encoding) from the buffer to the computer, and thus is still comfortably ahead of today's disk-to-buffer transfer rates. Data transfer rate (read/write) can be measured by writing a large file to disk using special file generator tools, then reading back the file. Transfer rate can be influenced by
file system fragmentation In computing, file system fragmentation, sometimes called file system aging, is the tendency of a file system to lay out the contents of files non-continuously to allow in-place modification of their contents. It is a special case of data fragmen ...
and the layout of the files. HDD data transfer rate depends upon the rotational speed of the platters and the data recording density. Because heat and vibration limit rotational speed, advancing density becomes the main method to improve sequential transfer rates. Higher speeds require a more powerful spindle motor, which creates more heat. While areal density advances by increasing both the number of tracks across the disk and the number of sectors per track, only the latter increases the data transfer rate for a given rpm. Since data transfer rate performance tracks only one of the two components of areal density, its performance improves at a lower rate.


Other considerations

Other performance considerations include quality-adjusted
price A price is the (usually not negative) quantity of payment or compensation given by one party to another in return for goods or services. In some situations, the price of production has a different name. If the product is a "good" in the ...
, power consumption, audible noise, and both operating and non-operating shock resistance.


Access and interfaces

Current hard drives connect to a computer over one of several
bus A bus (contracted from omnibus, with variants multibus, motorbus, autobus, etc.) is a road vehicle that carries significantly more passengers than an average car or van. It is most commonly used in public transport, but is also in use for cha ...
types, including parallel ATA, Serial ATA, SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and Fibre Channel. Some drives, especially external portable drives, use IEEE 1394, or
USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...
. All of these interfaces are digital; electronics on the drive process the analog signals from the read/write heads. Current drives present a consistent interface to the rest of the computer, independent of the data encoding scheme used internally, and independent of the physical number of disks and heads within the drive. Typically a
DSP DSP may refer to: Computing * Digital signal processing, the mathematical manipulation of an information signal * Digital signal processor, a microprocessor designed for digital signal processing * Yamaha DSP-1, a proprietary digital signal ...
in the electronics inside the drive takes the raw analog voltages from the read head and uses
PRML In computer data storage, partial-response maximum-likelihood (PRML) is a method for recovering the digital data from the weak analog read-back signal picked up by the head of a magnetic disk drive or tape drive. PRML was introduced to recover ...
and Reed–Solomon error correction to decode the data, then sends that data out the standard interface. That DSP also watches the error rate detected by error detection and correction, and performs
bad sector A bad sector in computing is a disk sector on a disk storage unit that is permanently damaged. Upon taking damage, all information stored on that sector is lost. When a bad sector is found and marked, the operating system like Windows or Linux will ...
remapping, data collection for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, and other internal tasks. Modern interfaces connect the drive to the host interface with a single data/control cable. Each drive also has an additional power cable, usually direct to the power supply unit. Older interfaces had separate cables for data signals and for drive control signals. *
Small Computer System Interface Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...
(SCSI), originally named SASI for Shugart Associates System Interface, was standard on servers, workstations,
Commodore Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...
, Atari ST and
Apple Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
computers through the mid-1990s, by which time most models had been transitioned to newer interfaces. The length limit of the data cable allows for external SCSI devices. The SCSI command set is still used in the more modern SAS interface. *
Integrated Drive Electronics Parallel ATA (PATA), originally , also known as IDE, is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connectio ...
(IDE), later standardized under the name
AT Attachment Parallel ATA (PATA), originally , also known as IDE, is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connectio ...
(ATA, with the alias PATA ( Parallel ATA) retroactively added upon introduction of SATA) moved the HDD controller from the interface card to the disk drive. This helped to standardize the host/controller interface, reduce the programming complexity in the host device driver, and reduced system cost and complexity. The 40-pin IDE/ATA connection transfers 16 bits of data at a time on the data cable. The data cable was originally 40-conductor, but later higher speed requirements led to an "ultra DMA" (UDMA) mode using an 80-conductor cable with additional wires to reduce crosstalk at high speed. * EIDE was an unofficial update (by Western Digital) to the original IDE standard, with the key improvement being the use of
direct memory access Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of computer systems and allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory independently of the central processing unit (CPU). Without DMA, when the CPU is using programmed input/output, it is ...
(DMA) to transfer data between the disk and the computer without the involvement of the CPU, an improvement later adopted by the official ATA standards. By directly transferring data between memory and disk, DMA eliminates the need for the CPU to copy byte per byte, therefore allowing it to process other tasks while the data transfer occurs. * Fibre Channel (FC) is a successor to parallel SCSI interface on enterprise market. It is a serial protocol. In disk drives usually the Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) connection topology is used. FC has much broader usage than mere disk interfaces, and it is the cornerstone of
storage area network A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from ser ...
s (SANs). Recently other protocols for this field, like
iSCSI Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...
and ATA over Ethernet have been developed as well. Confusingly, drives usually use ''copper'' twisted-pair cables for Fibre Channel, not fibre optics. The latter are traditionally reserved for larger devices, such as servers or
disk array controller A disk array controller is a device that manages the physical disk drives and presents them to the computer as logical units. It almost always implements hardware RAID, thus it is sometimes referred to as RAID controller. It also often provides ...
s. * Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). The SAS is a new generation serial communication protocol for devices designed to allow for much higher speed data transfers and is compatible with SATA. SAS uses a mechanically compatible data and power connector to standard 3.5-inch SATA1/SATA2 HDDs, and many server-oriented SAS RAID controllers are also capable of addressing SATA HDDs. SAS uses serial communication instead of the parallel method found in traditional SCSI devices but still uses SCSI commands. * Serial ATA (SATA). The SATA data cable has one data pair for differential transmission of data to the device, and one pair for differential receiving from the device, just like
EIA-422 RS-422, also known as TIA/EIA-422, is a technical standard originated by the Electronic Industries Alliance that specifies electrical characteristics of a digital signaling circuit. It was meant to be the foundation of a suite of standards that ...
. That requires that data be transmitted serially. A similar
differential signaling Differential signalling is a method for electrically transmitting information using two complementary signals. The technique sends the same electrical signal as a differential pair of signals, each in its own conductor. The pair of conduc ...
system is used in
RS485 RS-485, also known as TIA-485(-A) or EIA-485, is a standard defining the electrical characteristics of drivers and receivers for use in serial communications systems. Electrical signaling is balanced, and multipoint systems are supported. The s ...
,
LocalTalk LocalTalk is a particular implementation of the physical layer of the AppleTalk networking system from Apple Computer. LocalTalk specifies a system of shielded twisted pair cabling, plugged into self-terminating transceivers, running at a rate ...
,
USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...
, FireWire, and differential SCSI. SATA I to III are designed to be compatible with, and use, a subset of SAS commands, and compatible interfaces. Therefore, a SATA hard drive can be connected to and controlled by a SAS hard drive controller (with some minor exceptions such as drives/controllers with limited compatibility). However they cannot be connected the other way round—a SATA controller cannot be connected to a SAS drive.


Integrity and failure

Due to the extremely close spacing between the heads and the disk surface, HDDs are vulnerable to being damaged by a head crash – a failure of the disk in which the head scrapes across the platter surface, often grinding away the thin magnetic film and causing data loss. Head crashes can be caused by electronic failure, a sudden power failure, physical shock, contamination of the drive's internal enclosure, wear and tear,
corrosion Corrosion is a natural process that converts a refined metal into a more chemically stable oxide. It is the gradual deterioration of materials (usually a metal) by chemical or electrochemical reaction with their environment. Corrosion engi ...
, or poorly manufactured platters and heads. The HDD's spindle system relies on air density inside the
disk enclosure A disk enclosure is a specialized casing designed to hold and power disk drives while providing a mechanism to allow them to communicate to one or more separate computers. Drive enclosures provide power to the drives therein and convert the dat ...
to support the heads at their proper flying height while the disk rotates. HDDs require a certain range of air densities to operate properly. The connection to the external environment and density occurs through a small hole in the enclosure (about 0.5 mm in breadth), usually with a filter on the inside (the ''breather filter''). If the air density is too low, then there is not enough lift for the flying head, so the head gets too close to the disk, and there is a risk of head crashes and data loss. Specially manufactured sealed and pressurized disks are needed for reliable high-altitude operation, above about . Modern disks include temperature sensors and adjust their operation to the operating environment. Breather holes can be seen on all disk drives – they usually have a sticker next to them, warning the user not to cover the holes. The air inside the operating drive is constantly moving too, being swept in motion by friction with the spinning platters. This air passes through an internal recirculation (or "recirc") filter to remove any leftover contaminants from manufacture, any particles or chemicals that may have somehow entered the enclosure, and any particles or outgassing generated internally in normal operation. Very high humidity present for extended periods of time can corrode the heads and platters. An exception to this are hermetically sealed, helium filled HDDs that largely eliminate environmental issues that can arise due to humidity or atmospheric pressure changes. Such HDDs were introduced by HGST in their first successful high volume implementation in 2013. For giant magnetoresistive (GMR) heads in particular, a minor head crash from contamination (that does not remove the magnetic surface of the disk) still results in the head temporarily overheating, due to friction with the disk surface, and can render the data unreadable for a short period until the head temperature stabilizes (so called "thermal asperity", a problem which can partially be dealt with by proper electronic filtering of the read signal). When the logic board of a hard disk fails, the drive can often be restored to functioning order and the data recovered by replacing the circuit board with one of an identical hard disk. In the case of read-write head faults, they can be replaced using specialized tools in a dust-free environment. If the disk platters are undamaged, they can be transferred into an identical enclosure and the data can be copied or cloned onto a new drive. In the event of disk-platter failures, disassembly and imaging of the disk platters may be required. For logical damage to file systems, a variety of tools, including
fsck The system utility fsck (''file system consistency check'') is a tool for checking the consistency of a file system in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. A similar command, CHKDSK, exists in Microsoft Windows ...
on
UNIX-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...
systems and
CHKDSK In computing, CHKDSK (short for "check disk") is a system tool and command in DOS, Digital Research FlexOS, IBM/Toshiba 4690 OS, IBM OS/2, Microsoft Windows and related operating systems. It verifies the file system integrity of a volume and ...
on
Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...
, can be used for
data recovery In computing, data recovery is a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or formatted data from secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The dat ...
. Recovery from logical damage can require
file carving File carving is the process of reassembling computer files from fragments in the absence of filesystem metadata. Introduction and basic principles All filesystems contain some metadata that describes the actual file system. At a minimum, this in ...
. A common expectation is that hard disk drives designed and marketed for server use will fail less frequently than consumer-grade drives usually used in desktop computers. However, two independent studies by Carnegie Mellon University and
Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
found that the "grade" of a drive does not relate to the drive's failure rate. A 2011 summary of research, into SSD and magnetic disk failure patterns by
Tom's Hardware ''Tom's Hardware'' is an online publication owned by Future plc and focused on technology. It was founded in 1996 by Thomas Pabst. It provides articles, news, price comparisons, videos and reviews on computer hardware and high technology. The si ...
summarized research findings as follows: *
Mean time between failures Mean time between failures (MTBF) is the predicted elapsed time between inherent failures of a mechanical or electronic system during normal system operation. MTBF can be calculated as the arithmetic mean (average) time between failures of a system ...
(MTBF) does not indicate reliability; the annualized failure rate is higher and usually more relevant. * HDDs do not tend to fail during early use, and temperature has only a minor effect; instead, failure rates steadily increase with age. * S.M.A.R.T. warns of mechanical issues but not other issues affecting reliability, and is therefore not a reliable indicator of condition. * Failure rates of drives sold as "enterprise" and "consumer" are "very much similar", although these drive types are customized for their different operating environments. * In drive arrays, one drive's failure significantly increases the short-term risk of a second drive failing. , Backblaze, a storage provider reported an annualized failure rate of two percent per year for a storage farm with 110,000 off-the-shelf HDDs with the reliability varying widely between models and manufacturers. Backblaze subsequently reported that the failure rate for HDDs and SSD of equivalent age was similar. To minimize cost and overcome failures of individual HDDs, storage systems providers rely on redundant HDD arrays. HDDs that fail are replaced on an ongoing basis.


Market segments


Consumer segment

: ; Desktop HDDs : Desktop HDDs typically have two to five internal platters, rotate at 5,400 to 10,000 
rpm Revolutions per minute (abbreviated rpm, RPM, rev/min, r/min, or with the notation min−1) is a unit of rotational speed or rotational frequency for rotating machines. Standards ISO 80000-3:2019 defines a unit of rotation as the dimensionl ...
, and have a media transfer rate of 0.5 Gbit/s or higher (1 GB = 109 bytes; 1 Gbit/s = 109 bit/s). Earlier (1980–1990s) drives tend to be slower in rotation speed. , the highest-capacity
desktop A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...
HDDs stored 16  TB, with plans to release 18 TB drives later in 2019. 18 TB HDDs were released in 2020. , the typical speed of a hard drive in an average desktop computer is 7,200 RPM, whereas low-cost desktop computers may use 5,900 RPM or 5,400 RPM drives. For some time in the 2000s and early 2010s some desktop users and data centers also used 10,000 RPM drives such as
Western Digital Raptor The Western Digital Raptor (often marketed as WD Raptor, 2.5" models known as VelociRaptor) is a discontinued series of high performance hard disk drives produced by Western Digital first marketed in 2003. The drive occupies a niche in the enthus ...
but such drives have become much rarer and are not commonly used now, having been replaced by NAND flash-based SSDs. ; Mobile (laptop) HDDs : Smaller than their desktop and enterprise counterparts, they tend to be slower and have lower capacity, because typically has one internal platter and were 2.5" or 1.8" physical size instead of more common for desktops 3.5" form-factor. Mobile HDDs spin at 4,200 rpm, 5,200 rpm, 5,400 rpm, or 7,200 rpm, with 5,400 rpm being the most common. 7,200 rpm drives tend to be more expensive and have smaller capacities, while 4,200 rpm models usually have very high storage capacities. Because of smaller platter(s), mobile HDDs generally have lower capacity than their desktop counterparts. ; Consumer electronics HDDs : They include drives embedded into digital video recorders and automotive vehicles. The former are configured to provide a guaranteed streaming capacity, even in the face of read and write errors, while the latter are built to resist larger amounts of shock. They usually spin at a speed of 5400 RPM. ;External and portable HDDs : : Current external hard disk drives typically connect via
USB-C USB-C (properly known as USB Type-C) is a 24-pin USB connector system with a rotationally symmetrical connector. The designation C refers only to the connector's physical configuration or form factor and should not be confused with the conn ...
; earlier models use an regular USB (sometimes with using of a pair of ports for better bandwidth) or (rarely), e.g.,
eSATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...
connection. Variants using USB 2.0 interface generally have slower data transfer rates when compared to internally mounted hard drives connected through SATA.
Plug and play In computing, a plug and play (PnP) device or computer bus is one with a specification that facilitates the recognition of a hardware component in a system without the need for physical device configuration or user intervention in resolving resou ...
drive functionality offers system compatibility and features large storage options and portable design. , available capacities for external hard disk drives ranged from 500 GB to 10 TB. External hard disk drives are usually available as assembled integrated products but may be also assembled by combining an external
enclosure Enclosure or Inclosure is a term, used in English landownership, that refers to the appropriation of "waste" or " common land" enclosing it and by doing so depriving commoners of their rights of access and privilege. Agreements to enclose land ...
(with USB or other interface) with a separately purchased drive. They are available in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch sizes; 2.5-inch variants are typically called ''portable external drives'', while 3.5-inch variants are referred to as ''desktop external drives''. "Portable" drives are packaged in smaller and lighter enclosures than the "desktop" drives; additionally, "portable" drives use power provided by the USB connection, while "desktop" drives require external
power brick An AC adapter or AC/DC adapter is a type of external power supply, often enclosed in a case similar to an AC plug. Other common names include wall wart, power brick, wall charger, and power adapter. Adapters for battery-powered equipment may ...
s. Features such as
encryption In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can de ...
,
Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wav ...
connectivity, biometric security or multiple interfaces (for example, FireWire) are available at a higher cost. There are pre-assembled external hard disk drives that, when taken out from their enclosures, cannot be used internally in a laptop or desktop computer due to embedded USB interface on their printed circuit boards, and lack of SATA (or Parallel ATA) interfaces.


Enterprise and business segment

; Server and workstation HDDs : : Typically used with multiple-user computers running
enterprise software Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software (EAS), is computer software used to satisfy the needs of an organization rather than individual users. Such organizations include businesses, schools, interest-based user groups, ...
. Examples are: transaction processing databases, internet infrastructure (email, webserver, e-commerce), scientific computing software, and nearline storage management software. Enterprise drives commonly operate continuously ("24/7") in demanding environments while delivering the highest possible performance without sacrificing reliability. Maximum capacity is not the primary goal, and as a result the drives are often offered in capacities that are relatively low in relation to their cost. : The fastest enterprise HDDs spin at 10,000 or 15,000 rpm, and can achieve sequential media transfer speeds above 1.6 Gbit/s and a sustained transfer rate up to 1 Gbit/s. Drives running at 10,000 or 15,000 rpm use smaller platters to mitigate increased power requirements (as they have less
air drag In fluid dynamics, drag (sometimes called air resistance, a type of friction, or fluid resistance, another type of friction or fluid friction) is a force acting opposite to the relative motion of any object moving with respect to a surrounding ...
) and therefore generally have lower capacity than the highest capacity desktop drives. Enterprise HDDs are commonly connected through Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre Channel (FC). Some support multiple ports, so they can be connected to a redundant
host bus adapter In computer hardware, a host controller, host adapter, or host bus adapter (HBA), connects a computer system bus, which acts as the host system, to other network and storage devices. The terms are primarily used to refer to devices for conne ...
. : Enterprise HDDs can have sector sizes larger than 512 bytes (often 520, 524, 528 or 536 bytes). The additional per-sector space can be used by hardware RAID controllers or applications for storing
Data Integrity Field Data Integrity Field (DIF) is an approach to protect data integrity in computer data storage from data corruption. It was proposed in 2003 by the T10 subcommittee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards. A similar appr ...
(DIF) or Data Integrity Extensions (DIX) data, resulting in higher reliability and prevention of
silent data corruption Silent may mean any of the following: People with the name * Silent George, George Stone (outfielder) (1876–1945), American Major League Baseball outfielder and batting champion * Brandon Silent (born 1973), South African former footballer * C ...
. ; Video recording HDDs : This line were similar to consumer video recording HDDs with stream stability requirements and similar to server HDDs with requirements to expandability support, but also they strongly oriented for growing of internal capacity. The main sacrifice for this segment is a writing and reading speed.


Economy


Price evolution

HDD price per byte decreased at the rate of 40% per year during 1988–1996, 51% per year during 1996–2003 and 34% per year during 2003–2010. The price decrease slowed down to 13% per year during 2011–2014, as areal density increase slowed and the
2011 Thailand floods Severe flooding occurred during the 2011 monsoon season in Thailand. The flooding began at the end of July triggered by the landfall of Tropical Storm Nock-ten. These floods soon spread through the provinces of northern, northeastern, and centr ...
damaged manufacturing facilities and have held at 11% per year during 2010–2017. The
Federal Reserve Board The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, commonly known as the Federal Reserve Board, is the main governing body of the Federal Reserve System. It is charged with overseeing the Federal Reserve Banks and with helping implement the m ...
has published a quality-adjusted price index for large-scale enterprise storage systems including three or more enterprise HDDs and associated controllers, racks and cables. Prices for these large-scale storage systems decreased at the rate of 30% per year during 2004–2009 and 22% per year during 2009–2014.


Manufacturers and sales

More than 200 companies have manufactured HDDs over time, but consolidations have concentrated production to just three manufacturers today:
Western Digital Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...
, Seagate, and
Toshiba , commonly known as Toshiba and stylized as TOSHIBA, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, ...
. Production is mainly in the Pacific rim. Worldwide revenue for disk storage declined eight percent per year, from a peak of $38 billion in 2012 to $22 billion (estimated) in 2019. Production of HDD storage grew 15% per year during 2011–2017, from 335 to 780 exabytes per year. HDD shipments declined seven percent per year during this time period, from 620 to 406 million units. HDD shipments were projected to drop by 18% during 2018–2019, from 375 million to 309 million units. In 2018, Seagate has 40% of unit shipments, Western Digital has 37% of unit shipments, while Toshiba has 23% of unit shipments. The average sales price for the two largest manufacturers was $60 per unit in 2015.


Competition from SSDs

HDDs are being superseded by
solid-state drive A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is a ...
s (SSDs) in markets where their higher speed (up to 4950
megabytes The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes o ...
) (4.95
gigabytes The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix '' giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB. This definit ...
) per second for
M.2 M.2, pronounced ''m dot two'' and formerly known as the Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF), is a specification for internally mounted computer expansion cards and associated connectors. M.2 replaces the mSATA standard, which uses the PCI Ex ...
(NGFF)
NVMe NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The ...
SSDs, or 2500
megabytes The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes o ...
(2.5
gigabytes The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix '' giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB. This definit ...
) per second for
PCIe PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...
expansion card drives), ruggedness, and lower power are more important than price, since the bit cost of SSDs is four to nine times higher than HDDs. , HDDs are reported to have a failure rate of 2–9% per year, while SSDs have fewer failures: 1–3% per year. However, SSDs have more un-correctable data errors than HDDs. SSDs offer larger capacities (up to 100 TB) than the largest HDD and/or higher storage densities (100 TB and 30 TB SSDs are housed in 2.5 inch HDD cases but with the same height as a 3.5-inch HDD), although their cost remains prohibitive. A laboratory demonstration of a 1.33-Tb 3D NAND chip with 96 layers (NAND commonly used in
solid state drive A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is ...
s (SSDs)) had 5.5 Tbit/in2 , while the maximum areal density for HDDs is 1.5 Tbit/in2. The areal density of flash memory is doubling every two years, similar to Moore's law (40% per year) and faster than the 10–20% per year for HDDs. , the maximum capacity was 16 terabytes for an HDD, and 100 terabytes for an SSD. HDDs were used in 70% of the desktop and notebook computers produced in 2016, and SSDs were used in 30%. The usage share of HDDs is declining and could drop below 50% in 2018–2019 according to one forecast, because SSDs are replacing smaller-capacity (less than one-terabyte) HDDs in desktop and notebook computers and MP3 players. The market for silicon-based flash memory (NAND) chips, used in SSDs and other applications, is growing faster than for HDDs. Worldwide NAND revenue grew 16% per year from $22 billion to $57 billion during 2011–2017, while production grew 45% per year from 19 exabytes to 175 exabytes.


See also

*
Automatic acoustic management Automatic acoustic management (AAM) is a method for reducing acoustic emanations in AT Attachment (ATA) mass storage devices for computer data storage, such as ATA hard disk drives and ATAPI optical disc drives. AAM is an optional feature set for ...
*
Cleanroom A cleanroom or clean room is an engineered space, which maintains a very low concentration of airborne particulates. It is well isolated, well-controlled from contamination, and actively cleansed. Such rooms are commonly needed for scientif ...
*
Click of death Click of death is a term that had become common in the late 1990s referring to the clicking sound in disk storage systems that signals a disk drive has failed, often catastrophically. The clicking sound itself arises from the unexpected moveme ...
*
Comparison of disk encryption software This is a technical feature comparison of different disk encryption software. Background information Operating systems Features * Hidden containers: Whether hidden containers (an encrypted container (A) within another encrypted container (B) ...
*
Data erasure Data erasure (sometimes referred to as data clearing, data wiping, or data destruction) is a software-based method of overwriting the data that aims to completely destroy all electronic data residing on a hard disk drive or other digital media b ...
*
Drive mapping Drive mapping is how Microsoft Windows associates a local drive letter (A through Z) with a shared storage area to another computer (often referred as a File Server) over a network. After a drive has been mapped, a software application on a clie ...
* Error recovery control *
Hard disk drive performance characteristics Higher performance in hard disk drives comes from devices which have better performance characteristics. These performance characteristics can be grouped into two categories: access time and data transfer time (or rate). Access time The ''access ...
*
Hybrid drive In computing, a hybrid drive (solid state hybrid drive – SSHD) is a logical or physical storage device that combines a faster storage medium such as solid-state drive (SSD) with a higher-capacity hard disk drive (HDD). The intent is adding s ...
*
Microdrive The Microdrive is a registered trademark for miniature, 1-inch hard disks produced by IBM and Hitachi. These rotational media storage devices were designed to fit in CompactFlash (CF) Type II slots. The release of similar drives by other ...
*
Network drive In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by the workstations that are ab ...
(file server,
shared resource In computing, a shared resource, or network share, is a computer resource made available from one host to other hosts on a computer network. It is a device or piece of information on a computer that can be remotely accessed from another compu ...
) *
Object storage Object storage (also known as object-based storage) is a computer data storage that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and block storage which manages data a ...
*
Write precompensation Write precompensation (abbreviated WPcom in the literature) is a technical aspect of the design of hard disks, floppy disks and other digital magnetic recording devices. It is the modification of the analog write signal, shifting transitions somew ...


Notes


References


Further reading

* * *


External links


Hard Disk Drives Encyclopedia

Video showing an opened HD working







Hard disk hacking
firmware modifications, in eight parts, going as far as booting a Linux kernel on an ordinary HDD controller board
Hiding Data in Hard Drive’s Service Areas
February 14, 2013, by Ariel Berkman
Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) Information Sheet
Western Digital Western Digital Corporation (WDC, commonly known as Western Digital or WD) is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology produc ...
, January 2013
PowerChoice Technology for Hard Disk Drive Power Savings and Flexibility
Seagate Technology, March 2010
Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR)
HGST HGST, Inc. (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services. It was initially a subsidiary of Hitachi, formed through its acquisition of IBM's disk d ...
, Inc., 2015
The Road to Helium
HGST, Inc., 2015
Research paper about perspective usage of magnetic photoconductors in magneto-optical data storage.
{{Authority control American inventions Articles containing video clips Computer data storage Computer storage devices Rotating disc computer storage media 20th-century inventions