How hard drives store data?

[Shlouski]

I was wondering, as a hard frive fills up with space, does it fill each layer from the outside in or fill up one level and move on to the next? I guess the info on the outside of the disk can be accessed faster than in the center, as its moving faster.

 

[voyagerfan99]

From what I understand, data is saved on the drive in a "fragmented" form, which means there are bits of a piece of say a song scattered all over the drive itself, on no particular level. However, you can get defrag programs that can "consolidate" the data, which will put it either st the edge of the disk, or the center of the cylinder.

 

[linkin]

^ and this shows great performance increases, especially if it has never been done before or not in a long time (2 months and over)

 

[tyttebøvs]

The platters (layers?) are filled a bit like ram running in dual channel

 

[mkeyz01]

what other information is stored with files besides time/date of access?

 

[Cromewell]

From what I understand, data is saved on the drive in a "fragmented" form, which means there are bits of a piece of say a song scattered all over the drive itself, on no particular level. However, you can get defrag programs that can "consolidate" the data, which will put it either st the edge of the disk, or the center of the cylinder.

There are ways to make the drive use the fastest edge first like partitioning but generally you're right. The first spot that's big enough to hold what's being saved is used, if nothing big enough is available then it gets fragmented. That's why a mostly empty drive doesn't fragment very fast where as a very full drive does.