Cylinders versus tracks...

A Cylinder is not a single point; it's the collection of multiple tracks that are all under the read/write heads whenever the heads are positioned over that cylinder. It exists only because there are multiple heads. However, while a double sided floppy drive does have cylinders, some systems did not take advantage of them and accessed the floppy drive using all of one side first, then all of the other side, rather than using cylinders (rather than tracks) sequentially. Both types of access are possible, and cylinder based access is clearly "better", but not all systems worked that way. Message: 31 Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 06:59:35 -0600 From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> Subject: Cylinders versus tracks... To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Message-ID: <458BD6B7.8040100 at yahoo.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Out of interest, which is the correct terminology when defining a single point on a disk's surface - is it better to talk in terms of cylinders, or tracks? People often seem to talk about floppy drives in terms of tracks, heads and sectors (e.g. for an 80 cylinder floppy with two sides they'll still talk in terms of tracks 1-80 in conjunction with a side number, even though the media has 160 tracks in total) Talking in terms of cylinders seems to be generally the norm with hard disks though, and perhaps seems a bit more sensible - but remember that hard disk manufacturers are the people who introduced decimal megabytes into common use :-) Personally I prefer to talk in terms of 'surface number' rather than 'head number', as a given surface could conceivably have more than one head in order to improve media latency - but I'm unsure as to whether to use cylinder/surface/sector or track/surface/sector. It's all just semantics, but for the stuff I'm currently working on I'd rather go with the 'correct' version even if that happens not to be the one most commonly used... cheers Jules