A hard disk drive failure occurs when a hard disk drive malfunctions and the stored information cannot be accessed with a properly configured computer.

Hard disk drives are accessed over one of a number of bus types, including parallel ATA (PATA, also called IDE or EIDE; described before the introduction of SATA as ATA), Serial ATA, SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI, and Fibre Channel.

Higher performance in hard disk drives comes from devices which have better performance characteristics.

A hard disk drive platter or hard disk is the circular magnetic disk on which digital data is stored in a hard disk drive.