Hard Drives (HDDs)

Internal Hard Drives (HDDs)

Hard drives, also known as HDDs, are still the most widespread storage solution in computer technology, whether for home users or in professional server and database environments. They are relatively inexpensive, considered reliable, and can be easily replaced if needed. The latter is true, of course, only if the golden rule is followed: always think about backups!

"HDD" stands for "Hard Disk Drive" and refers to the working principle of hard drives, where rotating magnetic disks ("platters") store the data, which is accessed by a read/write head ("head"). A buffer of several tens of megabytes holds the most frequently needed data for quick use.

Buy Hard Drive Models for Every Purpose

Since there are various application fields in data storage, there are also different types of hard drives, with differences ranging from storage capacity to the format of the HDDs to speed and interface standards:

• Hard drives are available in a very wide range of volumes, with the maximum capacity of individual HDDs continually increasing and currently standing at 12 terabytes (TB), or 12,000 gigabytes (GB).
• In addition to the larger 3.5-inch hard drives, there are also smaller drives in the 2.5-inch format, which is also common for most SSDs. Although they generally store smaller amounts of data and are usually somewhat slower, they typically consume less power, fit into many laptops, and can be easily used as portable hard drives in an appropriate external hard drive enclosure.
• Fast hard drives operate with disk rotation speeds of 7,200 RPM, while the particularly energy-saving variants use 5,400 RPM. The SATA-6G interface with transfer rates up to 600 MB/s has now become established and replaces SATA II with only 300 MB/s transfer speed.
• Various providers have hard drives optimized for recording data captured by security cameras. In general, there are HDDs optimized for almost every specific use case.