Posts: smart

Hard disks and S.M.A.R.T.

Old hard disks exposed a lot of their internals to the operating system: in order to request a data block from the drive, the system had to specify the exact cylinder, head and sector (CHS) where it was located (as happens with floppy disks). This structure became unsustainable as drives got larger (due to some limits in the BIOS calls) and more intelligent. Current hard disks are little (and complex) specific-purpose machines that work in LBA mode (not CHS).

December 4, 2006 · Tags: hardware, smart
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