Conceptual
Login

Platter, Track, Sector and Cylinder Geometry of a Hard Disk

A hard disk stores bits on spinning platters divided into concentric tracks and angular sectors, with the aligned tracks across all platters forming a cylinder reachable by one position of the moving arm and its per-surface heads. A student who has learned this can say where a given byte physically sits, and can explain which movement is required to reach a byte on the same track, on another head of the same cylinder, or on a distant cylinder.