Hi Alan, on Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 08:57:42AM +0200, you wrote: > These days the entire concept of a "cylinder" is a mere abstraction to make > tools like fdisk work in a sane manner.
Of course not. The disk is physically organized in cylinders, that's the
structure dictated by the mechanical design. That a disk controller is
theoretically free to map cylinders and sectors to whereever it pleases
doesn't mean that there wasn't a direct relationship between cylinder
number and physical location on the platter in the vast majority of
non-broken (i.e. cylinder-remapped) disks. With many HD tests in
magazines you get a cylinder-vs.-transfer-rate plot and it still mostly
matches the old rule. I suppose not even firmware hackers are really
eager to make things more complicated than absolutely necessary :)
cheers,
Matthias
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