硬盘

• Pinyin: yìng pán
• Hanzi breakdown: 硬 = 石 + 更 (stone + phonetic — hard, firm); 盘 = 舟 + 皿 (boat + vessel — flat dish, extended to disk)

Meaning

Hard disk drive (HDD); hard drive. The primary storage device in computers, or more broadly any non-volatile storage device including SSDs in colloquial use.

Refers specifically to the traditional magnetic hard disk drive (HDD), though in everyday speech it is often used loosely for any internal storage. Appears in tech, business, legal, and security contexts. Common collocations: 移动硬盘 (external/portable hard drive), 固态硬盘 (SSD), 硬盘损坏 (hard drive failure), 格式化硬盘 (to format a hard drive).

Examples

1. 这家公司推出的新硬盘用上热辅助磁记录技术，容量提到32TB。 This company's new hard drive uses heat-assisted magnetic recording technology and raises capacity to 32 TB.
2. 搜查证券公司时，司法机关扣押了17块服务器硬盘，里面有交易指令和内部通讯。 During the raid on the securities firm, authorities seized 17 server hard drives containing trade orders and internal communications.
3. 随着AI训练数据暴增，数据中心对大容量、高可靠性硬盘的需求每年都在大幅增长。 As AI training data explodes, data centers' demand for high-capacity, highly reliable hard drives is growing rapidly every year.

Usage Guide

Context: technology, computing, legal, business

Tone: neutral

Do Say

• 那家机构凭自研修复技术，从一块火灾烧损的企业级硬盘中完整恢复了98.7TB关键数据。(With its self-developed recovery technology, that company fully restored 98.7 TB of critical data from an enterprise hard drive damaged in a fire.)
• 专家建议，淘汰旧服务器硬盘时要多轮覆写或物理粉碎，别只靠格式化就以为数据已清除。(Experts advise that when retiring old server hard drives, you should use multi-pass overwriting or physical shredding, and never assume formatting alone has erased the data.)

Don't Say

• 我的硬盘里有很多照片 — 硬盘 is correct here, but more natural in everyday speech is 我电脑里存了很多照片 unless you are specifically distinguishing the hard drive from other storage; 硬盘 is most natural in technical contexts

Origin & History

硬 (hard, firm — 石 stone radical + 更 phonetic) + 盘 (plate/disk — 舟 boat + 皿 vessel, originally a flat vessel, extended to any disk-shaped object)

Cultural Context

Era: Modern

Generation: All ages

Social background: Universal