{{Unreferenced, date=November 2009 A disk drive track is a circular path on the surface of a disk or diskette on which information is magnetically recorded and from which recorded information is read.
A track is a physical division of data in a disk drive, as used in the Cylinder-Head-Record (CCHHR) addressing mode of a

CKD disk Count key data (CKD) is a direct-access storage device (DASD) data recording format introduced in 1964, by IBM with its IBM System/360 and still being emulated on IBM mainframes. It is a self-defining format with each data record represented by a ...

. The concept is concentric, through the physical

platters The Platters was an American vocal group formed in 1952. They are one of the most successful vocal groups of the early rock and roll era. Their distinctive sound bridges the pre-rock Tin Pan Alley tradition and the new burgeoning genre. The ac ...

, being a data circle per each cylinder of the whole disk drive. In other words, the number of tracks on a single surface in the drive exactly equals the number of cylinders of the drive.
Tracks are subdivided into blocks (or sectors, pages) (see:

Storage block In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. Each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, traditionally 512 bytes for hard disk drives (HDDs) and 2048 bytes for CD-ROMs and DV ...

and

Virtual page A page, memory page, or virtual page is a fixed-length contiguous block of virtual memory, described by a single entry in the page table. It is the smallest unit of data for memory management in a virtual memory operating system. Similarly, a p ...

).
The term track is sometimes prefaced with the word logical (i.e. "3390-9 has 3 logical tracks per physical track") to emphasize that it is used as an abstract concept, not a track in the physical sense.

See also