Drive, American English sense 29, “(computing) a unit that reads and writes data on magnetic tape, a disk, etc.” ( op.You can see the progressive shift of meaning from the device that transmits motion to the assembly as a whole: The derivative, computing-specific senses of drive are also attested by Collins.See also the example in American English sense 27a, “any apparatus that transmits power in a motor vehicle: a gear drive”.Drive, American English sense 28, “a device that communicates motion to a machine or machine part”.Drive in this original sense is attested in American English by Collins English Dictionary:.
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Much of what I’ve written here also relies on personal knowledge: I have been in the industry for 40 years. Many end users have begun referring to the entire tower or system unit of a personal computer as the hard drive, a further broadening of the term.⁴ Notesįor more about the history of disk drives, see the Wikipedia article “ History of hard disk drives”. In short, while the word drive still has its original meaning, it now also has a figurative meaning: it can refer to any storage device that takes the place of a traditional storage drive. And when remote file storage functionally replaced these storage devices, it often got the drive label as well: network drive, Google Drive, OneDrive.³
#Hard disk drive definition zip
When companies came along with devices which performed the same function as sealed disk drives, they called them drives too, in order to make clear that they were marketing disk drive replacements: RAM drives, ZIP drives, USB drives, thumbdrives. It also became common to refer to it as the hard drive to distinguish it from the floppy drive installed in the same cabinet.²
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People referred to this device informally as either the disk or the drive. The drive imparted to them a spinning motion:Īs disk technology matured, it became common for disks to be permanently sealed and non-removable – that is, the disk and the drive became one device. It was the mechanism that you mounted the storage device onto.¹ Spools of tape were mounted on the motor spindle of a tape drive, and disk packs and floppy disks were mounted on the motor spindle of a disk drive. Originally, the drive was not the storage device.