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What is a "Drive" in a Computer?

The term "drive" has three meanings in a computer:

  1. Physically, it's a mass storage device—it's the physical device that where your files are permanently stored, responsible for writing their data to a mass storage medium— such as a hard disk drive (HDD), solid state drive (SSD), CD drive, floppy disk drive, or USB flash drive (thumb drive, pen drive, jump drive, clip drive). None of these drives actually have any "drives" in them. See [Why Drives are Called "Drives" if They Aren't Drives?].
  2. A "drive" on Windows is a filesystem that the operating system has access to, such as NTFS and FAT, which could be installed inside a partition of a mass storage medium. Typically this partition would be the entire medium, i.e. the entire physical drive, but it's possible for a single drive to be partitioned into multiple filesystems, in which case you would have one single hard disk, for example, and it would get the drive letter D: for one of its partitions and E: for the other.
  3. Some personal cloud storage products also feature the word "drive" in their name, such as Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.

Note: a "drive" without an "r" is a piece of hardware. The term shouldn't be confused with driver with an "r" which is a software.

Images

An opened beige computer tower. The front panel has a wide drive with a a light and a button and a rectangular part (the CD drive), and under it a smaller drive with a light, a button, and a rectangular slot.
An old computer tower with a CD drive (top) and a floppy disk drive (under it). Photo: Ryan Snyder on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.
A small black plastic box with a USB plug sticking out of it. Printed on it: "Trek ThumbDrive".
A Trek ThumbDrive. Photo: 健ちゃん on Wikimedia. License: CC BY SA 3.0.
A Windows 11's File Explorer window, showing a tab labelled "This PC." On the sidebar, "This PC" is selected. The main pane has a group labelled "Devices and drives" with one item labelled "Local Disk (C:)." An over than half filled blue bar. Under it: 247 GB free of 931 GB.
The "This PC" location on Windows 11 displaying the C: drive as a local "disk."
Photo of a hard disk of 500 gigabytes labelled WD Scorpio Blue. The device is a rectangular metal block that's not very thick.
A hard disk drive. Photo: Matt Kieffer. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.
Written by Noel Santos.

About the Author

I'm a self-taught Brazilian programmer graduated in IT from a FATEC. In a world of increasingly complex and essential computers, I decided to use my technical expertise in hardware, desktop applications, and web technologies to create an informative resource to make PC's easier to understand.

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