Brian Cryer's Glossary of IT Terms with Links

HDD

HDD

1. Hard Disk Drive. Also referred to simply as HD. See also IDE, SCSI, SMART.

2. Hybrid Disk Drive. A (standard) Hard Disk Drive that incorporates flash memory as a buffer (likely minimum of 1GB of flash). When compared to a traditional disk drive, a hybrid disk driver offers:

• significantly improved start-up times for PCs (because most of the files required at start-up can be read from the flash memory rather than the disk).
• power savings (and corresponding longer battery life for laptops) because the flash memory will allow most writes to be cached (in non volatile storage) allowing the disk spindle to be powered down for much of the time.