tracks on hard disk & cd rom

[rookie1010]

why does a hard disk have multiple tracks whereas a cd rom has a single track?

 

[jaksback]

i beleive its the density of the actual disk. on the hd there are numerous read/writing heads (i.e. multiple tracks) whereas on a cd its done by one laser beam

 

[Lone Wolf]

why does a hard disk have multiple tracks whereas a cd rom has a single track?

Your assumptiong of multiple tracks vs. single tracks is wrong. There is no such thing as a 'track' on a hdd for data storage.

Data on a HDD is stored differently compared to a CD. On a HDD, data is stored on clusters. A group of clusters in turn make up a sector. A group of sectors make up the hard drive.

 

[bla!!]

CD's and Hard Drives are organized mostly in the same way.

The first subdivision of a CD/HD is a track. This is a circular area of even width. These tracks are then split up into sectors. From there sectors are organized into clusters for your OS/CDROM to access them. Typical size is 64 sectors to a cluster.

The one extra organization scheme HD's have that CD's don't are cylinders. A cylinder is a section of all of the platters in the HD accessed by the same Track.

IE Cylinder 1 is made up of Track 1 on Platter 1 + Track 2 on Platter 2..... etc.

So, I guess to answer the question in this post, CD and Hard Drives both have multiple tracks. Just think about mucis CD's. Each song is dubbed, a track (even though it's likely that the song isn't contained in a single track).

 

[Lone Wolf]

CD's and Hard Drives are organized mostly in the same way.

The one extra organization scheme HD's have that CD's don't are cylinders. A cylinder is a section of all of the platters in the HD accessed by the same Track.

IE Cylinder 1 is made up of Track 1 on Platter 1 + Track 2 on Platter 2..... etc.

So, I guess to answer the question in this post, CD and Hard Drives both have multiple tracks. Just think about mucis CD's. Each song is dubbed, a track (even though it's likely that the song isn't contained in a single track).

Bla! I was wrong in saying that HDDs don't have tracks - they do. However, CD's don't have clustors nor sectors as they do not use the same FAT/NTFS file system as hard drives do.

 

[killians45]

Actually, the track on the CD is one long continuous spiral track, even though the seperation between the two is considered a track. Best way to look at this is here:


http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cd2.htm