A hardware feature that used to be standard on computers and consoles has quietly disappeared. Several practical shifts explain why it stopped mattering.

(2) A magnetic disk drive that plugs into a USB port on a computer. Used for transport as well as backup and additional storage, portable hard drives rival the capacity of many internal hard drives.

Over the last few years, much of the enterprise storage market has focused on flash technology, but the hard disk drive (HDD) format has plenty of life in it yet. It is true that flash storage offers ...