American Megatrends Atlas III PCI User Manual page 48

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
42 Atlas PCI-III PCI Pentium ISA Motherboard User's Guide
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