

Early desktop PCs like the first IBM PC, XT and AT tended to have up to four 5.25" drive bays, so a full-height hard drive would take up two of these. The 5.25" here means the drive itself has a physical width of 5.25". They took up two 5.25" drive bays, one above the other (see pic above) - the same as the first floppy disk drives, which was later referred to as "full height".

These first hard disks were sometimes called "Winchester" disks due to their historical name from mainframe days, and were also often referred to as a "fixed disk" to distinguish it from a "floppy disk". It's a bit strange, but whatever you learned to call it is what you continue to say today - to me they are hard disks, but then for floppies I would say floppy drives (into which you insert a disk) - I know, weird right? But there we go! Moving on. Incidentally, I want to mention that the term "hard disk" and "hard drive" are the same. It wasn't until 1989 that hard disk prices had dropped to a price point that most home PC buyers could really afford - a 20 MB Seagate ST-225 then had a retail price of $230, and if you were better off, an 80 MB ST-4096 from Seagate had a price tag of $630. However, due to the high cost of hard disk drives in PCs right up to the mid-80s, it was relatively uncommon for a non-business PC to have a hard disk until around 1986. This computer came with a Western Digital 10 MB hard disk as standard. Hard disks have been around in some form or other since the 1960s, but the first hard disks that appeared in a PC were those introduced with the IBM PC/XT (eXtended Technology) in 1983.
