American Megatrends Merlin DP User Manual page 35

Standard Setup,
Continued
Entering Drive Parameters
You can also enter the hard disk drive parameters. The drive parameters are:
Parameter
Type
Cylinders
Heads
Write
Precompensation
Landing Zone
Sectors
Capacity
Chapter 2 WINBIOS Setup
Description
The number for a drive with certain identification
parameters.
The number of cylinders in the disk drive.
The number of heads.
The actual physical size of a sector gets progressively
smaller as the track diameter diminishes. Yet each
sector must still hold 512 bytes. Write precompensation
circuitry on the hard disk compensates for the physical
difference in sector size by boosting the write current
for sectors on inner tracks. This parameter is the track
number on the disk surface where write
precompensation begins.
This number is the cylinder location where the heads
normally park when the system is shut down.
The number of sectors per track. MFM drives have 17
sectors per track. RLL drives have 26 sectors per track.
ESDI drives have 34 sectors per track. SCSI and IDE
drives have even more sectors per track.
The formatted capacity of the drive is the number of
heads times the number of cylinders times the number
of sectors per track times 512 (bytes per sector).
Cont'd