Search Result for "disk drive":
Wordnet 3.0

NOUN (1)

1. computer hardware that holds and spins a magnetic or optical disk and reads and writes information on it;
[syn: disk drive, disc drive, hard drive, Winchester drive]


The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:

Drive \Drive\ (dr[imac]v), n. 1. The act of driving; a trip or an excursion in a carriage, as for exercise or pleasure; -- distinguished from a ride taken on horseback. [1913 Webster] 2. A place suitable or agreeable for driving; a road prepared for driving. [1913 Webster] 3. Violent or rapid motion; a rushing onward or away; esp., a forced or hurried dispatch of business. [1913 Webster] The Murdstonian drive in business. --M. Arnold. [1913 Webster] 4. In type founding and forging, an impression or matrix, formed by a punch drift. [1913 Webster] 5. A collection of objects that are driven; a mass of logs to be floated down a river. [Colloq.] Syn: See Ride. [1913 Webster] 6. a private road; a driveway. [PJC] 7. a strong psychological motivation to perform some activity. [PJC] 8. (Computers) a device for reading or writing data from or to a data storage medium, as a disk drive, a tape drive, a CD drive, etc. [PJC] 9. an organized effort by a group to accomplish a goal within a limited period of time; as, a fund-raising drive. [PJC] 10. a physiological function of an organism motivating it to perform specific behaviors; as, the sex drive. [PJC] 11. (Football) the period during which one team sustains movement of the ball toward the opponent's goal without losing possession of the ball; as, a long drive downfield. [PJC] 12. an act of driving a vehicle, especially an automobile; the journey undertaken by driving an automobile; as, to go for a drive in the country. [PJC] 13. the mechanism which causes the moving parts of a machine to move; as, a belt drive. [PJC] 14. the way in which the propulsive force of a vehicle is transmitted to the road; as, a car with four-wheel drive, front-wheel drive, etc. [PJC]
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):

disk drive n 1: computer hardware that holds and spins a magnetic or optical disk and reads and writes information on it [syn: disk drive, disc drive, hard drive, Winchester drive]
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):

disk drive FDD floppy disk drive floppy drive (Or "hard disk drive", "hard drive", "floppy disk drive", "floppy drive") A peripheral device that reads and writes hard disks or floppy disks. The drive contains a motor to rotate the disk at a constant rate and one or more read/write heads which are positioned over the desired track by a servo mechanism. It also contains the electronics to amplify the signals from the heads to normal digital logic levels and vice versa. In order for a disk drive to start to read or write a given location a read/write head must be positioned radially over the right track and rotationally over the start of the right sector. Radial motion is known as "seeking" and it is this which causes most of the intermittent noise heard during disk activity. There is usually one head for each disk surface and all heads move together. The set of locations which are accessible with the heads in a given radial position are known as a "cylinder". The "seek time" is the time taken to seek to a different cylinder. The disk is constantly rotating (except for some floppy disk drives where the motor is switched off between accesses to reduce wear and power consumption) so positioning the heads over the right sector is simply a matter of waiting until it arrives under the head. With a single set of heads this "rotational latency" will be on average half a revolution but some big drives have multiple sets of heads spaced at equal angles around the disk. If seeking and rotation are independent, access time is seek time + rotational latency. When accessing multiple tracks sequentially, data is sometimes arranged so that by the time the seek from one track to the next has finished, the disk has rotated just enough to begin accessing the next track. See also sector interleave. Early disk drives had a capacity of a few megabytes and were housed inside a separate cabinet the size of a washing machine. Over a few decades they shrunk to fit a terabyte or more in a box the size of a paperback book. The disks may be removable disks; floppy disks always are, removable hard disks were common on mainframes and minicomputers but less so on microcomputers until the mid 1990s(?) with products like the Zip Drive. A CD-ROM drive is not usually referred to as a disk drive. Two common interfaces for disk drives (and other devices) are SCSI and IDE. ST-506 used to be common in microcomputers (in the 1980s?). (1997-04-15)