The shaft that rotates in the middle of a
disk drive. In a removable disk, the spindle remains attached to the drive, as with a
CD-ROM ; with a fixed disk the spindle remains attached to the
platter.
Laptop computers these days are often described by the number of spindles. The increasingly common three-spindle laptop houses three drives - one for the hard disk, one for
floppy disks, one for CD-ROMs.