These platters spin at high speeds -- typically 5,400 or 7,200 revolutions per minute (RPM) for general-use drives -- and a tiny actuator arm hovers just above the surface, reading or writing data ...

Speaking of the actuator-and-arm assemblage, even though I’d removed all visible screws holding it in place, it still wouldn’t budge. I therefore suspected it was also restrained from further ...

The hard drive, which typically provides storage for data and applications within a computer, has four key components inside its casing ... it's also known as the head arm or actuator arm.

The humble hard drive doesn't get much respect these days. ... Seagate's largest actuator arm has 8 platters and 16 heads -- but the heads are all mounted to a single structure.

In a conventional hard disk drive, data is written to and read from a surface by way of a series of magnetic heads attached to an arm. An actuator moves these heads up and down, usually as one group.

SSDs’ absence of a high-speed rotating motor powering multiple platters, along with fast-moving actuator arms whenever the HDD is being accessed, and; SSDs’ ability to more rapidly transition out of ...