When I first wrote The PC Guide in 1997, this page mentioned how each platter of a hard
disk was "capable of storing in excess of one billion bytes of information". As
I revise this section in 2000, leading-edge hard disks now pack a whopping 20 GB of
storage per platter in the same amount of space. Pretty amazing.
Of course, this trend is only going to continue, with new drives having more and more
data in the same space. In order to use all this real estate to best advantage, special
methods have evolved for dividing the disk up into usable pieces. The goals, as usual, are
two-fold: increasing capacity and increasing performance. This section takes a detailed
look at how information is encoded, stored, retrieved and managed on a modern hard disk.
Many of the descriptions in this section in fact form the basis for how data is stored on
other media as well.
Next: Data Encoding
and Decoding
