Magnetic disks provide the bulk of secondary storage for modern computer systems. Conceptually, disks are relatively simple. Each disk platter has a flat circular shape, like a CD. Common platter diameters range from 1.8 to 3.5 inches. The two surfaces of a platter are covered with a magnetic material. We store information by recording it magnetically on the platters
A read–write head “flies” just above each surface of every platter. The heads are attached to a disk arm that moves all the heads as a unit. The surface of a platter is logically divided into circular tracks, which are subdivided into sectors. The set of tracks that are at one arm position makes up a cylinder. There may be thousands of concentric cylinders in a disk drive, and each track may contain hundreds of sectors. The storage capacity of common disk drives is measured in gigabytes
When the disk is in use, a drive motor spins it at high speed. Most drives rotate 60 to 250 times per second, specified in terms of rotations per minute (RPM). Common drives spin at 5,400, 7,200, 10,000, and 15,000 RPM. Disk speed has two parts. The transfer rate is the rate at which data flow between the drive and the computer. The positioning time, or random-access time, consists of two parts: the time necessary to move the disk arm to the desired cylinder, called the seek time, and the time necessary for the desired sector to rotate to the disk head, called the rotational latency. Typical disks can transfer several megabytes of data per second, and they have seek times and rotational latencies of several milliseconds
Because the disk head flies on an extremely thin cushion of air (measured in microns), there is a danger that the head will make contact with the disk surface. Although the disk platters are coated with a thin protective layer, the head will sometimes damage the magnetic surface. This accident is called a head crash. A head crash normally cannot be repaired; the entire disk must be replaced
A disk can be removable, allowing different disks to be mounted as needed. Removable magnetic disks generally consist of one platter, held in a plastic case to prevent damage while not in the disk drive. Other forms of removable disks include CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs as well as removable flash-memory devices known as flash drives (which are a type of solid-state drive)
A disk drive is attached to a computer by a set of wires called an I/O bus. Several kinds of buses are available, including advanced technology attachment (ATA), serial ATA (SATA), eSATA, universal serial bus (USB), and fibre channel (FC). The data transfers on a bus are carried out by special electronic processors called controllers. The host controller is the controller at the computer end of the bus. A disk controller is built into each disk drive. To perform a disk I/O operation, the computer places a command into the host controller, typically using memory-mapped I/O ports, as described in Section 9.7.3. The host controller then sends the command via messages to the disk controller, and the disk controller operates the disk-drive hardware to carry out the command. Disk controllers usually have a built-in cache. Data transfer at the disk drive happens between the cache and the disk surface, and data transfer to the host, at fast electronic speeds, occurs between the cache and the host controller