Physical components or materials on which data is stored are called storage media.

Hardware
components that read/write to storage media are called storage devices. This academic essay is
aimed at diving into more detail about one device in particular: the hard disk drive.

To begin with, storage devices hold data even when the computer is turned off so the data can be
used whenever needed. Storage involves writing data to the medium and reading from the
medium. Writing data refers to recording the data on the surface of the disk where it is stored for
later use. Reading data on the other hand refers to retrieving data from the surface and
transferring it into the computer’s memory for use. Diskette drives, hard drives and tape drive all
use the same type of medium and use similar techniques for reading/writing data. Surfaces of
diskettes and magnetic tape are all coated with a magnetically sensitive material such as iron
oxide. The principle used to store data is that of polarization – all the ions in the magnetic
material align themselves in one direction. Just as a transistor can represent binary “on” or “off”,
the orientation of the magnetic field can be used to store data.

Peter Chen (2015) a magnet has one important advantage over a transistor and it can maintain its
state without a continual supply of electricity. Surfaces of disks are coated with millions of tiny
iron particles so data can be stored on them. Each particle acts as a magnet, taking on a magnetic
field when subjected to an electromagnet. The read/write heads of a hard disk drive contain
electromagnets, which generate magnetic fields in the iron on the storage medium as the head
passes over the disk. The read/write heads store a string of 1s and 0s by alternating the direction
of the current in the electromagnet.

To read data the process is reversed. The read/write heads pass over the disk while no current is
flowing through the electromagnet. The storage medium has a charge and the electromagnet.
Storage medium changes the magnet in the head which causes a small current to flow through
the head in one direction or the other depending on the polarity of the field. The disk drive senses
direction of flow and data is sent from the head into memory. Hard drives fall into magnetic
storage category because they record data as magnetic fields. A hard disk contains one or more
rigid metal platters coated with iron oxide permanently enclosed in a hard disk drive, Ruemmler
and Wilkes (2012).

Seagate (2009) shaded more light when he said, “When formatting a hard disk, the disk creates a
set of magnetic concentric circles called tracks, on each side of the disk. A hard disk may have

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several hundred tracks on each side of each platter. Each track is a separate circle. These are
numbered from the outermost circle to the innermost, starting with zero.”

A disks allocation of sectors per track is somewhat wasteful because the outer longer tracks
could theoretically hold more data than the shorter inner ones. For this reason, hard disks allocate
more sectors to the longer tracks on the disks surface. As we move towards the disks center, each
subsequent track has fewer sectors. This arrangement takes advantage of the hard disks potential
capacity and enables a typical hard disk to store data more efficiently than a floppy disk. The
different capacities of disks are generally a function of the number of sides, tracks and sectors
per track. A sector can be defined as the smallest unit with which any disk drive can work. Each
bit and byte within a sector can have different values but the drive can read or write only whole
sectors at a time. hard drives store data in tracks divided into sectors. Each platter is covered with
a metal coating and the entire unit is contained in a sealed chamber. The hard disk and drive are a
single unit which includes the hard disk, the motor that spins the platters and a set of read/write
heads. The rigidity of the disk and the high-speed rotation allow more data to be recorded on the
surface. Waving a magnet past an electric coil causes a current to flow. Dr Riedel
(February,2019) simplified it this way, “the faster the magnet is waved and the closer the magnet
are to the coil, the larger the current generated in the coil and the greater the data is stored on the
hard disk”. That is, the disk that spins faster can use smaller magnetic charge to make current
flow to the read/write head. The drives heads can also use a lower density current to record data
on the disk. Not only do hard disks pack the data closer together they also hold more data
because they usually include multiple platters stacked one on top of each other. This
configuration means that the disk has more than 2 sides, in addition to side 0 and 1 there are
sides 2, 3, 4, and so on. Larger capacity disks may use 12 platters but both side of every platter
are not always used.

Many of these details are available in excellent papers by Anderson Dykes, and Riedel (2019).
They revealed, “a platter, is a circular hard surface on which data is stored persistently by
inducing magnetic charges to it”. A disk may have one or more platters; each platter has 2 sides,
each of which is called a surface. These platters are usually made of some hard material (such
as aluminum), and then coated with a thin magnetic layer that enables the drive to persistently
store bits even when the drive is powered off.

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In addition, the platters are all bound together around the spindle, which is connected to a motor
that spins the platters around (while the drive is powered on) at a constant (fixed) rate. The rate
of rotation is often measured in rotations per minute (RPM), and typical modern values are in
the 7,200RPM to 15,000RPM range.

Another documentary by Margo Seltzer, Peter Chen, John Ousterhout(2015) revealed that data
is encoded on each surface in concentric circles of sectors; one concentric circle is called a
track. A single surface contains many thousands and thousands of tracks, tightly packed
together, with hundreds of tracks fitting into the width of a human hair. To read and write from
the surface, Hard drive need a mechanism that allows it to either sense (i.e., read) the magnetic
patterns on the disk or to induce a charge in (i.e., write) them. This process of reading and
writing is accomplished by the disk head; there is one such head per surface of the drive. The
disk head is attached to a single disk arm, which moves across the surface to position the head
over the desired track. Many drives employ some kind of track skew to make sure that
sequential reads can be properly serviced even when crossing track boundaries. Rotates this way
Sectors are often skewed like this because when switching from one track to another, the disk
needs time to reposition the head (even to neighboring tracks). Without such skew, the head
would be moved to the next track but the desired next block would have already rotated under
the head, and thus the drive would have to wait almost the entire rotational delay to access the
next block. Schlosser and Ganger (2008) called this the “unwritten contract” of disk drives

Finally, an important part of any modern disk drive is its cache, for historical reasons sometimes
called a track buffer. This cache is just some small amount of memory (usually around 8 or 16
MB) which the drive can use to hold data read from or written to the disk. For example, when
reading a sector from the disk, the drive might decide to read in all of the sectors on that track
and cache them in its memory; doing so allows the drive to quickly respond to any subsequent
requests to the same track. On writes, the drive has a choice: should it acknowledge the write has
completed when it has put the data in its memory, or after the write has actually been written to
disk? Well, the former is called write back caching (or sometimes immediate reporting), and
the latter write through. Write back caching sometimes makes the drive appear “faster”, but can
be dangerous. If the file system or applications require that data be written to disk in a certain
order for correctness, write-back caching can lead to problems.

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 References

1. Dave Anderson, Jim Dykes, Erik Riedel(February 2019) “More Than an Interface: SCSI
vs. ATA”FABU p.23, Chicago University.
2. Ruemmler, Wilkes (2012)“An Introduction to Disk Drive Modeling” IEEE Computer,
CABI.p.118: London.
3. Margo Seltzer, Peter Chen, John Ousterhout(2015) “Hard disk storage Revisited”.
USENIX. A paper that talks about how rotation matters too in the world of Hard disk
storage.
4. Steven Schlosser, Gregory. R . Ganger(2008)“MEMS-based storage devices and
standard disk interfaces: A square peg in a round hole?”, pg. 87-100.
5. Seagate(2009)“BarracudaES.2datasheet”,http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/
disc/ds_barracuda_es.pdf. A

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