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?
Depends on whether you want two numbers or three, I'd say. :-)
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)
The medium has thousands of sectors, too, but it doesn't seem to bother
you to speak of sector number within the context of a given track; I
don't understand what bothers you about speaking of track number within
the context of a given cylinder.
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 :-)
They also brought us ZBR; unless you're going to the trouble to get
hold of the notch table, or you're talking about pre-ZBR disks, using
cylinder/track-within-cylinder/sector-within-track terminology, while
physically accurate, is not terribly useful - regardless of which words
you use for the numbers.
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...
I'm not aware of any standard beyond that of common use, on this point
(which of course does not mean there is none). It does seem to me that
using "track" for cylinder number is likely to be confusing, because
when I've seen it used, it's been referring to track-within-cylinder,
which is your "surface" - except for floppies, confusingly enough.
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