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For most disks, each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, traditionally 512 bytes for hard disk drives (HDDs), and 2048 bytes for CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs and BD-ROMs. [1] Newer HDDs and SSDs use 4096 byte (4 KiB) sectors, which are known as the Advanced Format (AF). The sector is the minimum storage unit of a hard drive. [2]
Optical drives for computers come in two main form factors: half-height (also known as desktop drive) and slim type (used in laptop computers and compact desktop computers). They exist as both internal and external variants. Half-height optical drives are around 4 centimetres tall, while slim type optical drives are around 1 cm tall.
The recording employs various electronic, magnetic, optical, or mechanical changes to the disk's surface layer. A disk drive is a device implementing such a storage mechanism. Notable types are hard disk drives (HDD), containing one or more non-removable rigid platters ; the floppy disk drive (FDD) and its removable floppy disk ; and various ...
A hard disk drive platter or hard disk is the circular magnetic disk on which digital data is stored in a hard disk drive. [1] The rigid nature of the platters is what gives them their name (as opposed to the flexible materials which are used to make floppy disks ).
When writing, the magnetic medium is heated locally by a laser, which induces a rapid decrease of coercive field. Then, a small magnetic field can be used to switch the magnetisation. The reading process is based on magneto-optical Kerr effect. The magnetic medium are typically amorphous R-Fe-Co thin film (R being a rare earth element).
A Kerr microscope relies on the MOKE in order to image differences in the magnetization on a surface of magnetic material. In a Kerr microscope, the illuminating light is first passed through a polarizer filter, then reflects from the sample and passes through an analyzer polarizing filter, before going through a regular optical microscope ...
However, not all optical drives provide this capability, and support for this feature can vary significantly between manufacturers and drive models. On drives lacking raw data access, users may rely on a less precise method: monitoring unexpected reductions in read speed, though this is a far less reliable indicator of disc health.
Drum memory – a magnetic data storage device used as the main working memory in many early computers; i-RAM – a DRAM-based solid-state storage device produced by Gigabyte, operating as a SATA hard disk drive; Magnetic storage – the concept of storing data on a magnetised medium using different patterns of magnetisation