Hard disk drives (also called hard drives or disk drives) is the mechanism that reads and writes data on a hard disk. Hard disk drives (HDDs) for PCs generally have seek times of about 12 milliseconds or less. Many disk drives improve their performance through a technique called caching.
There are several interface standards for passing data between a hard disk and a computer. The most common are IDE and SCSI.
Hard disk drives are sometimes called Winchester drives, Winchester being the name of one of the first popular hard disk drive technologies developed by IBM in 1973.
