hard drive

[ hahrd-drahyv ]

See synonyms for hard drive on Thesaurus.com

nounComputers.

HDD.
(loosely) a drive for a computer, as a traditional hard disk drive (HDD) or another drive serving a similar function, as opposed to a very small, portable flash drive.

Origin of hard drive

First recorded in 1980–85

Words Nearby hard drive

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

How to use hard drive in a sentence

Michael Cioni, the startup’s global senior vice president of innovation, explained that while consumers expect to instantly upload video footage to the cloud, professional film and TV productions still rely on hard drives.
Frame.io streamlines film production with ‘camera to cloud’ video uploads | Anthony Ha | February 11, 2021 | TechCrunch
It asks you to forget everything you know about computer design—chips, CPUs, memory hard drives.
This ‘Quantum Brain’ Would Mimic Our Own to Speed Up AI | Shelly Fan | February 9, 2021 | Singularity Hub
His beliefs were revealed in court after a search of Brandenburg’s phone, computer and hard drive by the FBI.
Wisconsin pharmacist who destroyed more than 500 vaccine doses believes Earth is flat, FBI says | Andrea Salcedo | February 1, 2021 | Washington Post
If you’ve got masses of files in Dropbox, for example, you can always redownload them from the cloud—but it might be quicker and easier to copy them to an external hard drive before resetting.
How to reset your devices without losing everything | David Nield | January 28, 2021 | Popular-Science
Not to mention that any computer can experience hard drive failure, and the loss of data or important documents can be potentially devastating.
The best external hard drives: Expand your file storage | Eric Alt | January 22, 2021 | Popular-Science

The hard drive on a BBC laptop was erased and memory cards were wiped clean.
Violent Assaults on Reporters in Russia Go Unpunished | Anna Nemtsova | September 18, 2014 | THE DAILY BEAST
We got together, looked at old pictures, and put together these old songs from our hard drive.
Jenny Lewis on 'The Voyager,' the End of Rilo Kiley, and High School Classmate Angelina Jolie | Marlow Stern | August 17, 2014 | THE DAILY BEAST
“Sometimes stuff just happens,” Lerner emailed the IRS techs in 2011 as they tried to salvage her hard drive.
Paging Rose Mary Woods: Obama’s Unbelievable Missing IRS Emails | James Poulos | June 18, 2014 | THE DAILY BEAST
The hard drive was sent to the U.S. for the FBI lab to expose its secrets.
The Worst Place in the World for MH370 to Go Missing | Clive Irving | April 5, 2014 | THE DAILY BEAST
Brezler then remembered an external hard drive he had brought home from Afghanistan.
Why Was Firefighter-Marine Reserve Maj. Jason Brezler Betrayed? | Michael Daly | November 19, 2013 | THE DAILY BEAST
We've got a hard drive before us, and every man must be fit as a fiddle.
The Pony Rider Boys in Texas | Frank Gee Patchin
But it used to be impossible to fly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytes of storage.
Little Brother | Cory Doctorow
I kept hitting it, until the keyboard fell off, exposing the motherboard and the hard-drive.
Little Brother | Cory Doctorow
They tell you outside that it is a hard drive, all the way from twenty-five to thirty miles to Acoma.
Through Our Unknown Southwest | Agnes C. Laut
Many a hard drive, the hunt drive of the Men-kind, has come to nothing because of us—because we never sleep.
The Sa'-Zada Tales | William Alexander Fraser

British Dictionary definitions for hard drive

hard drive

noun

computing (on a computer) the mechanism that handles the reading, writing, and storage of data on the hard disk

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Scientific definitions for hard drive

hard drive

A disk drive that reads data stored on hard disks. Also called hard disk drive

Cultural definitions for hard drive

hard drive

The bulk of the memory of a personal computer is magnetically stored on hard disks that constitute the hard drive. Information in the hard drive is durable, in that it remains magnetically stored when the computer is turned off. (See magnetic memory.)

Browse