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If my 320 gb laptop hard drive has 255 heads how many platters does it have?
Wiki User
∙ 12y ago
It doesn't really have 255 heads. It most probably has one platter and two heads, at most.
You see, most HDDs today (anything newer than, say, 1998?) use LBA - that's Logical Block Addressing. It's a matter of simplicity, because new disks use something called zone bit recording, which means that on each given track, the further away from the center, the more sectors there are.
You see, disks can be addressed either physically (by mapping exactly one sector to a C/H/S position), or logically.
C/H/S, which stands for Cylinder/Head/Sector, is hanging around from the old MFM disks and DOS days, when disks were addressed physically. Physically here means that there was no translation to actual locations - BIOS handled the disk I/O. Unfortunately, this separation, combined with BIOS's inherent 16-bit-ness has quickly developed into a problem when new disks of great capacities (above 4GB) could not be addressed in this manner. They still can't be, to be honest, and the information given to BIOS is a bit pro-forma in that it doesn't tell the whole story. DOS programs can still access a PORTION of the space that way, but in order for the operating system to use the full space available, it has to understand LBA or access the hardware directly (which most OSes, Windows included, do).
So, again, these values have no real meaning. They certainly don't describe the physical properties of the disk. You see, there are up to two heads for any given platter, and as such, Your disk would have to have 128 platters! They're about 1mm thick, and with the heads in place, they take up some 5-6mm. That way, the disk would have to be some 77cm thick! No, these numbers are provided so that the BIOS and old (legacy) DOS programs can still make some use of the disk at all.
Keep in mind that this information is STILL used today, mostly by OS loaders like NTLDR, which need to only access a very small portion of space at the beginning of the disk. There resides a program that can take care of LBA addressing from that point. This is so that BIOS can handle calling the operating system starting procedure even with these limitations in place.
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∙ 12y ago
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