Any way to get information on physical geometry of drive?

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Hi,

I have a couple of WD Raptor drives, in a Windows XP-64 build. When I run msinfo32 to get information about the system, it says under System Summary - Components - Storage - Disks that Tracks/Cylinder=255. Which would mean that the number of heads is 255? And that the number of platters would be 128? This obviously can not be correct.

Is there any way to get information about the true geometry of my harddisk?

Maybe WD has a software that can shed light on this?

I am aware that there are varying number of sectors per track (more sectors the longer the track is – the further it is from the middle of the disk).

Is there any good book available at Amazon where on can read about hard drive specifics?

2

Modern drives have variable sectors per track and variable tracks per inch. These numbers vary between heads on the same drive.

See the following article:

http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_Tracks_and_Zones.html

You can see the differences between each head in a short-stroked HD Tune read benchmark graph:

http://malthus.zapto.org/viewtopic.php?t=650&p=2591#p2591

The same thread shows the actual geometry of a Seagate drive. WD’s drives would be similar.