On which track does my hard drive starts?

Question

Lots of questions and discussions about if your hard drive is faster on the inner- or outer-most track, but nothing about how to figure out if your hard-drive actually starts at the outer-most tracks.

So, where do you retrieve that information?

Answer 1

Magnetic drives (HDD, FDD...) always start from the outer side. There's no need to check for where your drive starts because it never starts from inside like optical discs

Moreover modern drives use LBA instead of the ancient CHS system because it has many disadvantages:

• Drive size is limited to 8GB (128GB for the later version which is why Windows 98 couldn't use drives larger than 128GB)

• A lot of disk area is wasted, because the outer track contains the same amount of data, despite its much much longer length (although some disks worked around this by having the outer track have more more sectors in the outer track)

  

LBA linearly grows from the outer edge, so the begin of the disk is always faster than the end. The tuple track-head-sector will be converted to LBA in older OSes, which means they can't use big drives. Knowing the track number doesn't help, because it's just a logical number that'll be converted to LBA anyway

See also

• Are partitions to the inner/outer edge significantly faster
• hard drive sectors vs. tracks