An Acronym for Hard Disk Drive. The component that permamently stores programs and files while the computer is off.
A typical cheap IDE hard disk drive these days might cost around NZ$200 for 40-60 Gigabytes(Gibibytes?) of data.
This photo is of a disk platter used at StanfordUniversity in the 1960s:
I put a $1 note in the lower-right corner to give you an idea of the platter's size. This platter could store 4 megabytes of data. The black mark around it is from a disk head crash (!!).
4 pages link to HDD:
