How did the term hard disks originate?

Answer 1

When metal platters were used as storage and were really heavy at the time.
Hence: floppy disks were made of plastic and were flexible.

Answer 2

I agree with Robert Miller's Answer. Its the actual reason for the name Hard Disk comparing to a floppy disk

Answer 3

The first hard disk drive was the IBM 350 Disk File, invented by Reynold Johnson and introduced in 1955 with the IBM 305 computer. This drive had fifty 24 inch platters, with a total capacity of five million characters. A single head was used for access to all the platters, making the average access time very slow.

The IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit Control System Meganical International System, announced in 1961, introduced the usage of a separate head for each data surface.

The first disk drive to use removable media was the IBM 1311 drive, which used the IBM 1316 disk pack to store two million characters.

In 1973, IBM introduced the 3340 "Winchester" disk system, the first to use a sealed head/disk assembly (HDA). Almost all modern disk drives now use this technology, and the term "Winchester" became a common description for all hard disks, though generally falling out of use during the 1990s. Project head designer/lead designer Kenneth Haughton named it after the Winchester 30-30 rifle after the developers called it the "30-30" because of its two 30 MB spindles.

For many years, hard disks were large, cumbersome devices, more suited to use in the protected environment of a data center or large office than in a harsh industrial environment (due to their delicacy), or small office or home (due to their size and power consumption). Before the early 1980s, most hard disks had 8-inch (20 cm) or 14-inch (35 cm) platters, required an equipment rack or a large amount of floor space (especially the large removable-media drives, which were often referred to as "washing machines"), and in many cases needed high-amperage or even three-phase power hookups due to the large motors they used. Because of this, hard disks were not commonly used with microcomputers until after 1980, when Seagate Technology introduced the ST-506, the first 5.25-inch hard drive, with a capacity of 5 megabytes. In fact, in its factory configuration the original IBM PC (IBM 5150) was not equipped with a hard drive.

Most microcomputer hard disk drives in the early 1980s were not sold under their manufacturer's names, but by OEMs as part of larger peripherals (such as the Corvus Disk System and the Apple ProFile). The IBM PC/XT had an internal hard disk, however, and this started a trend toward buying "bare" drives (often by mail order) and installing them directly into a system. Hard disk makers started marketing to end users as well as OEMs, and by the mid-1990s, hard disks had become available on retail store shelves.

While internal drives became the system of choice on PCs, external hard drives remained popular for much longer on the Apple Macintosh and other platforms. Every Mac made between 1986 and 1998 has a SCSI port on the back, making external expansion easy; also, "toaster" Macs did not have easily accessible hard drive bays (or, in the case of the Mac Plus, any hard drive bay at all), so on those models, external SCSI disks were the only reasonable option. External SCSI drives were also popular with older microcomputers such as the Apple II series, and were also used extensively in Servers, a usage which is still popular today. The appearance in the late 1990s of high-speed external interfaces such as USB and FireWire has made external disk systems popular among regular users once again, especially for users who move large amounts of data between two or more locations, and most hard disk makers now make their disks available in external cases.

The capacity of hard drives has grown exponentially over time. With early personal computers, a drive with a 20 megabyte capacity was considered large. In the latter half of the 1990s, hard drives with capacities of 1 gigabyte and greater became available. The "smallest" desktop hard disk still in production has a capacity of 40 gigabytes, while the largest-capacity internal drives are a 3/4 terabyte (750 gigabytes), with external drives at or exceeding one terabyte by using multiple internal disks.

Answer 4

because inside they are 2 or 3 or 4 or whatever many "hard disks", asd in contrast with a "floppy" which can flop around.

Answer 5

'Hard' disks are so-named because they are made of a solid, inflexible substance.
Contrast with 'floppy' disks made from a plastic, flexible sustance.
'Floppy disks have fallen out of favor, replaced by CDs, DVDs, and flash drives.