Hard disk

Hard drives are storage devices containing several flat disks and a dedicated motor in an enclosure. For more information, please refer to wikipedia's article.

= How to ... =

Detect all hard drives
To detect all harddisks (or better: storage devices) attached to your system, use the command: hwinfo --block

= Hard disks in Linux =

In Linux the hard disks are located in the /dev -directory. ATA hard disks are identified as hda, hdb, hdc, and hdd. See IDE tree mapping for more info. SCSI hard disks are listed as devices sda, sdb, sdc, sdd, sde, sdf, and sdg. For example, /dev/sda refers to SCSI hard disk a.

The space on a hard disk is usually divided into separate segments called partitions.