13.2 Disks Gaurav Sharma Class ID 212

Mechanics of Disks 2 Moving Principal Moving pieces of Disk are: 1. Disk assembly & 2. Head Assembly The disk assembly consists of one or more circular platters that rotate around a central spindle. The upper and lower surfaces of the platters are covered with a thin layer of magnetic material, on which bits are stored

Mechanics of Disk

A 0 is represented by orienting the magnetism of a small area in one direction and A 1 by orienting the magnetism in the opposite direction. The locations where bits are stored are organized into tracks, which are concentric circles on a single platter Tracks occupy most of a surface. A track consists of many points, each of which represents a single bit by the direction of its magnetism

Mechanics of Disk Tracks are organized into sectors, which are segments of the circle separated by gaps gaps that are not magnetized in either direction. The sector is an indivisible unit, as far as reading and writing the disk is concerned. It is also indivisible as far as errors are concerned.

Disk Surface

Mechanics of Disk Head assembly : holds the disk heads. For each surface there is one head. riding extremely close to the surface but never touching it. A head performs the reads & the write operation on Disk. The heads are each attached to an arm, and the arms for all the surfaces move in and out together, being part of the rigid head assembly.

The Disk Controller One or more disk drives are controlled by a disk controller, which is a small processor capable of : 1. Controlling the mechanical actuator that moves the head assembly to position the heads at a particular radius (r) {The tracks that are under the heads at the same time are said to form a cylinder}

The Disk Controller 2. Selecting a surface from which to read or write, and selecting a sector from the track on that surface that is under the head. 3. The controller is also responsible for knowing when the rotating spindle has reached the point where the desired sector is beginning to move under the head 4. Transferring the bits read from the desired sector to the computer's main memory or transferring the bits to be written from main memory to the intended sector. computer's main memory bits read from/write to the desired sector

The Disk Controller

Disk Storage Characteristics Rotation Speed of the Disk Assembly RPM, i.e., one rotation every 11 milliseconds, is common, although higher and lower speeds are found. Number of Platters per Unit. A typical disk drive has about five platters and therefore ten surfaces. However. the common diskette ("floppy" disk) and '.Zip.' disk have a single platter with two surfaces. and disk drives with up to 30 surfaces are found. Number of Tracks per Surface. Each surface may have as many as tracks, although diskettes have a much smaller number:

Disk Storage Characteristics Number of Bytes per Track. Common disk drives may base almost a million bytes per track, although diskettes' tracks hold much less. As mentioned, tracks are divided into sectors. Figure 11.5 shows 12 sectors per track, but in fact as many as 500 sectors per track are found in modern disks. Sectors, in turn, may hold several thousand bytes of data.

Thank You!