Disk
Disk
Disk
Sector = Track=
small arc concentric
of track circle
Interleaving
• Allows the read/write head to use the rotation
of the disk to its advantage
• One sector is written to and the disk skips to
several sectors down
Formatting
• Low level formatting done at factory
– Builds the File Allocation Table (FAT)
– Physically scans the disk media for defects
• Remember FAT is always located at Track 0
• High level formatting is automatically done
during installation of operating system
Operating System File Systems
• DOS uses FAT
• Windows 3.x uses Virtual FAT
• Win 95 uses VFAT and FAT32
• Win NT uses NTFS
Partitioning
• FDISK command is used
• Divides hard drive into logical subdivisions
which are seen by the operating system as
separate logical hard disks.
• Hard drives divided into primary and extended
partitions. The primary partition boots the
system. Can have up to 4 primary partitions
Partitioning
• Extended can be divided up to 23 times on disk.
• Partitioning disks improves disk efficiency through
reduced cluster size.
• In DOS, Win 3x and early versions of Win 95 a hard
disk over 2 GB must be divided into smaller partions
• Now Win 95 and Win 98 can create a primary
partition of up to 8 GB
• Following partition, the first sector on cylinder 0
reserved for master boot record
Disk compression
• Reduce amount of space taken up by files by
substituting codes for repeating patterns of
data
• To access data on compressed disk, must load
disk compression utility into RAM first
• This disk compression utility works between
OS and disk controller to intercept requests
and compress or decompress files- the result is
slower disk access
Backing up data
• Archival: full backup- contains everything
from the hard disk
• Incremental: contains only files that have been
modified since last (previous) backup
• Differential: backs up all the data modified
since last full backup
• Copy backup: copy duplicate of file, directory,
or disk to another disk
CD ROM
• Capacity of 650 MB
• Transfer speeds of around 24X speed
– X refers to the transfer speed in the first CD ROM,
which was 150 K
• CD is the slowest device on PC
• When installing to IDE system must be
configured as slave
• WORM and EO