Disk drives

1
Disk drives
2
Hard drives

• Geometry heads, tracks (sectors) and cylinder
• Physical construction an example
• Detailed description
• Disk capacity
• INT13 ROM BIOS uses INT13 to boot from drive
• originally 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors,
  512 bytes gt 528 MB barrier
• Large or ECHS heads x 2 and cylinders / 2
• LBA assume that the BIOS will do it today
• increased to 256 heads (1024x256x63x512) gt 8.4
  GB barrier
• Extended INT13 and 64-bit LBA
• present limit 144 Pentabytes (million gigabytes)
• Speed tens of milliseconds
• with Ultra DMA up to 133 MBs

3
Hard-drives Interfaces

• ATA(1-3) IDE and EIDE
• ATA(4-7)Ultra DMA (33,66,100, 133MBs)
• SCSI
• IDE vs. SCSI
• SATA Serial ATA (300MBs and more)
• USB and FireWire
• Installing hard-drives

4
Partitioning, formatting

• Partitions vs. drives
• For Windows
• boot from CD-ROM and setup will do it
• using Disk manager later on
• repartition without changing data/programs
  (before Windows 7) Partition Magic or Partition
  Commander.
• resizing partitions in Windows 7 disk manager
• High level formatting FAT, FAT32, NTFS 4, NTFS 5
  (2k,XP, 7)

5
Disk drive performance

• Fragmentation overview and defragmentation
  software (video for command prompt in Windows 7).
• Compression overview and file, folder and drives
  compression in Windows.
• Cache overview and hardware vs. software
• Swap file (paging file) overview and changing
  its size in Windows 7.