(1) Devices that use magnetic hard disks for storage. It often refers to portable devices such as digital music players that have hard disks rather than flash memory.
All desktop and laptop computers are presumed to have hard disks, and most servers have hard disks. However, client and server machines can be diskless and derive all their software and data from the network. Contrast with
flash based and
diskless.
(2) An application that retrieves data from the disk as required. Contrast with
memory based.