Hard Drives
Hard Drives
Hard Drives
CT 122
Hard Drive
a non-volatile storage device for digital data. The primary computer storage device, which spins, reads and writes one or more fixed disk platters.
Geometry
Electronic division of the hard drive. Number of heads, cylinders and sectors per track. Track - a circular path on the surface of a disk or
diskette on which information is recorded and read. Head - Disk read/write heads are the small parts of a disk drive, that move above the disk platter and transform platter's magnetic field into electrical current (read the disk) or vice versa transform electrical current into magnetic field (write the disk).
Geometry
Cylinders - On a hard disk that has multiple
platters, a cylinder consists of the track on each surface that is beneath the read/write head at a given position of the read/write arms. Cluster - A cluster is fixed number of adjacent sectors
that are treated as a unit of storage by the operating system; it consists of two to eight sectors, depending on the operating system.
Partition
2 common types:
Primary Partition Bootable Contains the operating system Extended Partition
File System
File Allocation Table (FAT)
Organizing system for partitions on a hard drive that keeps track of the locations of all files on a given partition. FAT12 - Designed as a file system for floppy disks, it limited cluster addresses to 12-bit values FAT16 16-bit values to store the address of each sector. FAT32 uses 32-bit values to store the address of each sector. NTFS New Technology File System
Standard file system of Windows NT, including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Uses super-FAT called Master File Table (MFT)
MFT - The master file table (MFT) is a database in which information about every file and directory on an NT File System (NTFS) volume is stored.
MASTER / SLAVE
Master/slave is a model of communication where one device or process has unidirectional control over one or more other devices. Master device that is doing the controlling
2 distinct functions:
Checking the disk occasionally for failed cluster Keeping data organized on the disk on the drive
Defragmentation
File clusters are rearrange to minimize file fragmentation.