{{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. The concept is concentric, through the physical platters, 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 and Virtual page).
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
*
Hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with mag ...
*
Disk sector
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 ...
*
Cylinder
A cylinder (from ) has traditionally been a three-dimensional solid, one of the most basic of curvilinear geometric shapes. In elementary geometry, it is considered a prism with a circle as its base.
A cylinder may also be defined as an ...