Disk drive

Updated: 10/02/2017 by Computer Hope

A disk drive is a physical drive in a computer capable of holding and retrieving information. The following section lists the different types of computer disk drives.

Tip

A "disk" drive refers to a magnetic disk inside of the drive or diskette. If the drive uses different technology, such as CD-ROM (compact disc read-only memory) that uses a laser, it's not called a "disk drive." In this example, a CD-ROM is called a disc drive.

Examples of computer disk drives

Bernoulli drive
Floppy disk drive
Hard drive
LS120 drive aka SuperDisk
Zip drive

Tip

See our drive definition for a full list of all computer drives.

A:, B:, C:, D:, Floppy drive terms, Hard drive terms, Hardware terms, RAM disk