Hard drive sectors vs. tracks

hard drive

In one rotation, how many sectors are passed over and how many tracks are passed over?

If you know the average value of sectors per track for a hard drive, how do you use this to estimate the number of cylinders?

Do all modern hard drives have 63 sectors per track? Are there any hard drives that have more than this?

Best Answer

Almost all modern hard drives report 63 sectors per track, because that's the maximum allowed by the BIOS specs.

This number (along with heads and cylinders) is of course fake and used only for compatibility addressing with very old programs. Internally they use a simple sector number starting from 0 (called LBA mode).

The real sector per track number is not only much larger, but it also varies depending on the distance from the spindle. See, for example, this page from the makers of HDDScan.

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