Hard Drive Geometry: The hard drive geometry of the disk is specified as:

• The number of cylinders that the disk contains;
• The number of tracks per cylinder (same as the number of heads);
• The number of sectors per track; and,
• The size of each sector (in bytes).

A typical hard drive consists physically of one or more circular platters which rotate about a central axis

The drive platters are divided into cylinders, which is the area of each platter which can be accessed without moving the heads. A cylinder is a barrel-shaped cross section of a disk, consisting of a circular strip from each side of each platter. The part of a cylinder which is the circular strip on a single latter is called a track.

Contributors

• JosephKmiec - 19 Jan 2002
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