硬盘表面的结构.doc

The goal of this article is to show how modern hard drives can read and write data. From this article you would know about zones, tracks, sectors, servo system, variable density and some over stuff. Warning! The following article has been rated as MA and contains: Engineering language Mind violating knowledge HDD nudity Joking apart, if you feel like you brain is going to shut down – take a break. As you know information stored on platters and it’s written by heads while platters are spinning. As any device which can store and retrieve information a hard drive needs to write data by special rules in order to read it back. HDD writes certain pieces on information in certain time frames, so to read data back HDD just calcs and synchs time, reads the pieces of information in certain time frames and decodes them. Let’s imaging generator which generates pulses in certain and equal periods of time, with each pulse writing head writes piece of information in certain format. If frequency of pulses in such generator is constant then all time frames to write data on the drive will be the same and it will be very easy to write data on platters and read it back. That’s how it would look on a platter’s surface. Black dots represent the beginning of writing with each pulse from the generator. The red circle represents path (one of them) which makes writing head during writing. Black circles represent inner and outer diameter of a platter (ID and OD). As you can see if the frequency of writing is the same for the whole surface of the platter but the density of writing wouldn’t be the same because the further head goes toward OD the faster is linear speed of the platter in that point (even if the radial speed of the platter is constant). The density which lies on the path of the head measured in Bits Per Inch or BPI. The path which makes head when flying above the surface called Track. And here comes a problem As you can see on this graph with one writing frequency drive looses a