hardware geometry is more accurately called "disk geometry". The "Large Disk HOWTO" claims:

"Disk geometry (with heads, cylinders and tracks) is something from the age of MFM and RLL. In those days it corresponded to a physical reality.

Nowadays, with IDE or SCSI, nobody is interested in what the `real' geometry of a disk is. Indeed, the number of sectors per track is variable - there are more sectors per track close to the outer rim of the disk - so there is no `real' number of sectors per track.

For the user it is best to regard a disk as just a linear array of sectors numbered 0, 1, ..., and leave it to the firmware to find out where a given sector lives on the disk. This linear numbering is called LBA."

A a hard drive's number of cylinders, heads, sectors and bytes per sector determine the capacity of the drive for the operating system allowing the proper storage and retrieval of data.

See also cluster.

Contributors

• RandyKramer - 21 Jan 2002
• MacADd - 19 Mar 2002
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