A Simple Disk Drive
In this lesson, we especially look at a single-track version of a hard-disk.
We'll cover the following...
Let’s understand how disks work by building up a model one track at a time. Assume we have a simple disk with a single track as the following figure shows.
This track has just 12 sectors, each of which is 512 bytes in size (our typical sector size, recall) and addressed therefore by the numbers 0 through 11. The single platter we have here rotates around the spindle, to which a motor is attached.
Of course, the track by itself isn’t too interesting; we want to be able to read or write those sectors, and thus we need a disk head, attached to a disk arm, as we now see in the figure below.
In the figure, the disk head, attached to the end of the arm, is positioned over sector 6, and the surface is rotating counter-clockwise. ...