UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Please advice me how to calculate logical layout values in hdd from below table.

Physical Layout
-----------------
Bytes per Sector : 512
Sectors per Track : 480-1272
Number of Heads : 4
Number of Disks : 2


Logical Layout
---------------
Number of Heads : 16
Number of Sectors / Track : 63
Number of Cylinders : 16,383
Number of Sectors : 312,581,808
Total Logical Data Bytes : 160,041,885,696





Calculations :
--------------
Number of Heads = ?
Number of Sectors = ?
Number of Cylinders = ?
Number of Sectors = ?
Total Logical Data Bytes = Number of Sectors (312,581,808)* Bytes per Sector (512)

The physical layout doesn't tell you anything at all about the logical layout, especially since it seems to have varying numbers of sectors per track which old-fashioned C/H/S can't accommodate. Handling the physical layout is the drive hardware's job now.

Head/track/sector is obsolete. Any modern drive, and most old ones, already use Logical Block Access, or LBA, which lets you just access blocks from 0 to N without caring about the details of where they're stored. The heads, cylinders, and tracks are all maxed out at 16, 16383, and 63 respectively, and probably don't do anything anymore -- now they just change the number of sectors.

Three questions.

1.But what maxes out those threee values ?
2. Is it hard disk controller or operating system ?
3. Are those values rigid ones or can be changed ?

The figures provided make no sense to me. Afaik "sectors per track" is not a variable on a physical disc. There is insufficient information supplied to determine the capacity of the physical disc(s) because the number of cylinders is missing.

More questions:

4) What is the manufacturers part number for each disc?
Can you post the data from the sticky label on each physical disc?
5) Is this some sort of SAN?
i.e Is this an example where the physical discs are not visible to the Operating System because of some intervening hardware or software?

4) What is the manufacturers part number for each disc?
HITACHI HTS541616J9SA00

5) Is this some sort of SAN?
No, it is 2,5'' SATA1 disk mounted in notebook

I don't know why manufacturer published such info about this disk.
I fully understand difference between physical vs logical block but completely don't understand why HITACHI has in regard on heads for instance 16 heads logically but 4 heads physically ?

For those who are following this thread, the data probably came from this PDF document from Hitachi. The data table is in table 4.1 . The variable sectors/track size table is in table 4.3 .

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techl...ATA_spv1.2.pdf



It makes a but more sense (to me) now because "number of disks" is actually the "number of platters" in old disc speak.

Corona688 has explained it well in an earlier post. The internal workings of the disc drive are not visible to the computer interface which sees the disc as a "normal" drive. The firmware on the drive itself is transparent - a bit like logical discs in a SAN.

Here is a post which explains how to extract the disk geometry metadata. Hard Disk Metadata