cylinder-head-sector
Sign in to saveAlso known as CHS, cylinder-head-sector addressing
right|thumb|Cylinder, head, and sector of a hard drive. Cylinder-head-sector (CHS) is an early method for giving addresses to each physical block of data on a hard disk drive.
~16 min read
Encyclopedic overview
11 sectionsContents
- Definitions
- Sectors
- Tracks
- Cylinders
- Heads
- Blocks and clusters
- CHS to LBA mapping
- History
- See also
- References
- Notes
right|thumb|Cylinder, head, and sector of a hard drive. Cylinder-head-sector (CHS) is an early method for giving addresses to each physical block of data on a hard disk drive.
It is a 3D-coordinate system made out of a vertical coordinate head, a horizontal (or radial) coordinate cylinder, and an angular coordinate sector. Head selects a circular surface: a platter in the disk (and one of its two sides). Cylinder is a cylindrical intersection through the stack of platters in a disk, centered around the disk's spindle. Combined, cylinder and head intersect to a circular line, or more precisely: a circular strip of physical data blocks called track. Sector finally selects which data block in this track is to be addressed, as the track is subdivided into several equally-sized portions, each of which is an arc of (360/n) degrees, where n is the number of sectors in the track.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “cylinder-head-sector” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.