HDD
One of two technologies used by hard drives where data is stored as magnetic spots on disks that rotate at a high speed. Compare with solid-state drive (SSD).
magnetic hard drive
A hard drive whose disk controller is integrated into the drive, eliminating the need for a controller cable and thus increasing speed as well as reducing price.
IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics)
A type of drive imaging that duplicates data on one drive to another drive and is used for fault tolerance. Windows calls RAID 1 a mirrored volume. Also called mirrored volume.
RAID 1
An electronic storage device with no moving parts that uses memory chips to store data instead of spinning disks (such as those used by magnetic hard drives and optical drives). Examples are jump drives (also known as key drives or thumb drives), flash memory cards, and solidstate disks used as hard drives in notebook computers designed for the most rugged uses. Also called solid-state disk (SSD) or solid-state drive (SSD). Compare with magnetic hard drive.
solid-state drive (SSD)
A Windows command to verify that the hard drive does not have bad sectors that can corrupt the file system.
chkdsk
A sealed, magnetic coil device that moves across the surface of a disk in a hard disk drive (HDD), either reading data from or writing data to the disk.
read/write head
An interface standard that uses a unique SATA connector and combines PCIe and SATA to improve on the performance of SATA Revision 3.x; three times faster than SATA Revision 3.x but not as fast as NVMe.
SATA Express
A technique that stripes data across three or more drives and uses parity checking, so that if one drive fails, the other drives can re-create the data stored on the failed drive. RAID 5 drives increase performance and provide fault tolerance. Windows calls these drives RAID-5 volumes.
RAID 5
The type of memory used in SSDs. NAND stands for “Not AND” and refers to the logic used when storing a 1 or 0 in the grid of rows and columns on the memory chip.
NAND flash memory
A Windows command to manage hard drives, partitions, and volumes.
diskpart
A process (usually performed at the factory) that electronically creates the hard drive tracks and sectors and tests for bad spots on the disk surface. Compare with high-level formatting.
low-level formatting
An interface between a host adapter and the CPU that can daisychain as many as 7 or 15 devices on a single bus.
SCSI (Small Computer System Interface)
A combination of RAID 1 and RAID 0 that requires at least four disks to work as an array of drives and provides the best redundancy and performance.
RAID 10
A technique used on a solid-state drive that ensures the logical block addressing does not always address the same physical blocks; this technique distributes write operations more evenly across the device.
wear leveling
A Windows command used to repair the BCD and boot sectors.
bootrec