[ The PC Guide | Systems and Components Reference Guide | Motherboard and System Devices | System BIOS | BIOS Settings | IDE Device Setup / Autodetection ]

Sectors

This setting is the number of sectors on each track (cylinder and head combination). A sector contains 512 bytes and is the smallest unit of data normally referenced on a hard disk. For older drives that use the same number of sectors per track, this is the number of physical sectors on each track; the most common number is 17.

Newer drives use zoned bit recording to place a different number of sectors on tracks in different parts of the disk. The BIOS only allows a single number for sectors per track (which was kind of bad planning), so these drives use a logical geometry, often specifying 63 sectors per track, the largest number that will fit in this field. The drive translates internally to the correct sector numbers.

Note: IDE autodetection will set this value automatically.

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