Spindle

The shaft that rotates in the middle of a disk drive. In a removable disk, the spindle remains attached to the drive, as with a CD-ROM ; with a fixed disk the spindle remains attached to the platter. Laptop computers these days are often described by the number of spindles. The increasingly common three-spindle laptop houses three drives – one for the hard disk, one for floppy disks, one for CD-ROMs.