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Disk Drives Explained

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the stuff-to-read dept.

CowboyRobot writes "Magnetic disk drives are one of those things I usually take for granted without thinking about, but I recently realized how little I understood about how they really work. ACM Queue has an article from their 'Storage' issue titled, 'You Don't Know Jack About Disks', which does a very good job of explaining exactly how magnetic disks have evolved since the 70s and how they work today."

1 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. A bit more history by Mostly+a+lurker · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Although I found the article interesting in terms of the modern developments in PC hard drives, it is a little misleading concerning the overall situation in the 1970s and 1980s.

    To take the IBM mainframe example he quotes: yes, IBM originally used a CKD (count-key-data) architecture and this was still preferred in the late 1970s for highest performance applications. However, in the last 1970s, IBM already provided FBA (fixed block architecture) disk drives such as the 3370. These moved intelligence of disk geometry into the disk controller and were quite easy to program.

    Other mainframe and minicomputer manufacturers had innovative schemes during the early 1980s.