CDROM, Floppy and Hard Disk

Structure
Plus some basic concepts

Presenter : Kianoosh Mokhtarian 82171002

Evaluators : …
…
 Table of Contents
 CD  Floppy Disk
• History • History
• Structure • Structure
• Data Recording • Data Recording/Retrieval
• How The CD Drive Works • Formatting
• CD File Systems • 3½ Inch (2HD) Disks
• Multiple Sessions • Hard Disk
• CD-ReWritable (CD-RW) • Some Basic Concepts
• DVD • Boot Sector
• Cluster
• FAT
• NTFS
PART 1
CD-ROM
 History
• Compact Disc - Digital Audio (CD-DA), the original CD
specification developed by Philips and Sony in 1980
• Specifications were published in Red Book, continued to be
updated (lastest version in 1999)
• In 1985 a standard for the storage of computer data by Sony
and Philips, CD-ROM (Compact Disc Read Only Memory)
• developments in the technology have been ongoing and rapid
– Compact Disc Interactive (CD-I)
– Compact Disc Television (CD-TV)
– Compact Disc Recording (CD-R)
– Digital Video Disc (DVD)
 Structure

• A CDROM Drive uses a

small plastic-encapsulated
disk that can store data
• This information is retrieved
using a Laser Beam
• A CD can store vast amounts
of information because it uses
light to record data in a
tightly packed form
 CD Layers
• The thickness of a CD can vary between 1.1 and 1.5mm
• A CD consists of four layers
• The biggest part is clear polycarbonate (nominally
1.2mm)
• There is a very thin layer of reflective metal (usually
aluminum) on top of the polycarbonate
• Then a thin layer of some protective material
covering the reflective metal
• A label or some screened lettering on top of
protective material
 CD Layers (cont’d)
Different layers of a CD :

(though the reflective metal layer is really so thin that it should just be represented by a line)
 CD Safety
• The label side of a CD is the
most vulnerable part of the disk
• the other side is protected by
the thick (1.2mm) and hard
polycarbonate
• It is possible to carefully clean
and even to polish this surface
to remove fingerprints and
even scratches
• Many flaws on the polycarbonate surface will simply
go unnoticed
 CD vs. Magnetic Media
• In Magnetic Media (like floppy/hard
disk) the surface is arranged into
concentric circles called “tracks”
• Number of sectors per track is
constant for all tracks
• the CD has one single track, starts at
the center of the disk and spirals out
to the circumference of the disk
• This track is divided into sectors of
equal size
 CD Data Recording
• Information is
recorded on a
CD using a
series of bumps

• These bumps are called “pits” because they are looking like
pits in the polycarbonate layer (looking down from the top in
the diagram above)
• The disk is read from the bottom, through the transparent
polycarbonate (the pits appear as bumps to the scanning laser)
 Data Recording (cont’d)
• The unmarked areas between pits are called "lands”
• Lands are flat surface areas
• The information is
stored permanently
as pits and lands on
the CD-ROM. It
cannot be changed
once the CD-ROM is
mastered, this is why
its called CD-ROM
 How The CD Drive Works
• A motor rotates the CD
• the rotational speed varies so
as to maintain a Constant
Linear Velocity (the disk is
rotated faster when its inner
"SPIRALS" are being read)
How The CD Drive Works (cont’d)
• A laser beam is shone onto the surface of the disk
• The light is scattered by the pits and reflected by the lands,
these two variations encode the binary 0's and 1's
• A light sensitive diode picks up the reflected laser light and
converts the light to digital data
How The CD Drive Works (cont’d)
 CD-ROM Drive Speed
• The CD-ROM drives are classified by their rotational speed
• Based on the original speed of a CD-Audio (e.g. A "2X"
CD-ROM drive will run at twice the speed of a CD- Audio)

Speed Information transfer rate

1X 150 Kbytes/s
2X 300 Kbytes/s
… …
 CD Physical Specifications
Diameter 120mm ±0.3mm
Transparent Layer Thickness 1.2mm ±0.1mm
Total Thickness 1.1mm - 1.5mm
Transparent Layer Index of 1.55 ±0.10
Refraction
Reflectance of Metal Layer 70% minimum
through Transparent Layer
Laser Wavelength 780nm ±10nm
Track Pitch 1.6 micron ±0.1 micron
Scanning Linear Velocity 1.20m/s - 1.40m/s (±0.01m/s)
 CD File Systems
1. ISO-9660
The base standard defines three levels of compliance
– Level 1 limits file names to 8+3 foramat. Many
special characters (space, hyphen, equals, and plus)
are forbidden
– Level 2 and 3 allow longer filenames (up to 31) and
deeper directory structures (32 levels instead of 8)
– Level 2 and 3 are not usable on some systems,
notably MS-DOS
 CD File Systems (cont’d)
2. Rock Ridge
• Extensions to ISO-9660 file system
• Favored in the Unix world
• Lifts file name restrictions, but also allows Unix-style
permissions and special files to be stored on the CD
• Machines that don't support Rock Ridge can still read
the files because it's still an ISO-9660 file system (they
won't see the long forms of the names)
• UNIX systems and the Mac support Rock Ridge
• DOS and Windows currently don't support it
 CD File Systems (cont’d)
3. Joliet
• Favored in the MS Windows world
• Allows Unicode characters to be used for all text fields
(including file names and the volume name)
• Disk is readable as ISO-9660, but shows the long
filenames under MS Windows
4. HFS (Hierarchical File System)
Used by the Macintosh in place of the ISO-9660, making
the disk unusable on systems that don't support HFS
 Multiple Sessions
• Allows CDs to be written more than once (not re-written)
• Some CD writers support this feature
• About 640MB of data can be written to the CD, as some
space is reserved for timing and other information
• Each session written has an overhead of approximately
20MB per session
 CD-ReWritable (CD-RW)
• It is essentially CD-R
• Allows discs to be written and
re-written up to 1000 times
• The storage capacity is the
same as that for CD-R
• Based on phase-change
technology
• The recording layer is a
mixture of silver, indium,
antimony and tellurium
 CD-RW Recording Process
• The recording layer is polycrystalline
• The laser heats selected areas of the recording track to the
recording layer's melting point of 500 to 700 degrees Celsius
 CD-RW Recording (cont’d)
• The laser beam melts the crystals and makes them non-
crystalline (amorphous phase)
• The medium quickly cools, locking in the properties of the
heated areas
• The amorphous areas have a lower reflectivity than the
crystalline areas
• This creates a pattern which can be read as pits and lands
of the traditional CD
• To erase a CD-RW disc, the recording laser turns the
amorphous areas back into crystalline areas
 DVD
• Digital Versatile Disk (Formerly Digital Video Disk)
• same size (120mm) and
thickness (1.2mm) as CD
• Improvements in the
logarithms used for error
correction
• Much greater data accuracy
using smaller Error
Correction Codes (ECC)
• More effective use of the
track space
 DVD vs. CD
• DVD uses a tighter spiral (track or helix) with only 0.74
microns between the tracks (1.6 microns on CDs)
• DVD recorders use a laser with a smaller wavelength, 635nm
or 650 nm (visible red light) vs. 780nm (infrared) for CDs
• DVD has smaller "burns" (pits) in the translucent dye layer
(0.4 microns minimum vs. 0.83 microns minimum on CDs)

• These technologies allow DVDs to store large amounts of data

 DVD (cont’d)
• Standard single-sided DVDs store up to 4.7GB of data
• Dual-sided discs hold about 8.5GB of data (9.4GB for
back-to-back layers dual-sided discs)
• In back-to-back layers discs, it must be turned over to
access the data on the reverse side
• DVD uses MPEG2 compression for high quality pictures
• DVD drives have a much faster transfer rate than CD drives
• DVD-ROM drives will read and play existing CD-ROM
and CD-A disks
PART 2
Floppy Disks
(floppies or diskettes)
 History
1. The 8-inch disk
- First attempt by IBM in 1967, the result was a diskette
storing 80KBytes of data
- 250KB, 800KB and 1MB floppies untill 1975
- The problem was their poor media quality
2. The 5¼-inch minifloppy
- First developed in 1976, storing 110KB
- In 1978, double-sided drive doubled the
capacity, and a new "double density"
format increased it to 360 KB
 History (cont’d)
3. The 3-inch compact
floppy disk
- No more capacity than the
more popular (and cheap)
5¼" floppies
- More reliable thanks to its
hard casing
- Their main problems were
their high prices
 History (cont’d)
4. The 3½-inch floppy
disk
- originally offered in a
360 KB single-sided and
720 KB double-sided
double-density format

- A newer "high-density" format, displayed as "HD" on the

disks and storing 1440 KB of data, in the mid-80s
- Another advance in the oxide coatings allowed a new
"extended-density" ("ED") format at 2880 KB in 1991
 Structure
• Made from circular sheets of plastic which are coated with
a magnetic material
• A central hole for coupling to the disk drive
• An envelope seals the disk to protect and "clean" the disk
• An aperture in the envelope to
expose a section of the disk to
allow magnetic heads to read
and write
• A button on the corner to switch
the disk to write-protected mode
 Physical Structure
• A disk is divided into
many concentric circles
(lines of recorded data)
called “tracks”
• The disk is also divided
into wedge-shaped
segments called “sectors”
• The number of sectors per track is the same in all tracks
• So the outer sectors are larger than the inners, but has the
same capacity
 Data Recording
• Similar to the operation of a domestic tape recorder
• An electric current flows
through a coil of wire
• A magnetic field is produced
• This field is used to
magnetise the coating of iron
oxide on a floppy disk
• Varying electrical current,
the signal is passed through
the coil and the variations
are "recorded" on the disk
 Data Retrieval
• The disk is rotated at
low speed (200 to 600
revolutions/min)
• The disk moves under
the head
• A very small electric
current is induced into
the head and the stored
data is retrieved
 Double Sided Disks
• Are used in a disk drive with two read/write heads
• A pressure pad is fitted for each head
 Formatting (IBM)
• During the "formatting" process each sector has written in it a :
- 51 bytes prologue field containing the track and sector number
- 512 bytes data field
- 28 bytes unusable field and delay gap between sectors
- The track, sector, and the data field are followed by a CRC
(cyclic redundancy check) checksum
- Whenever data are read from the disk a new checksum is
calculated and compared to the written one
- An error message is generated if the two don't agree
 Hard Disk
• Fixed and
removable
• Fast (disk
rotates at 60
to 200 times
per second)

• Currently 20 – 180 GB (may be limited by the version of

the operating system)
• Like floppies, uses the magnetic properties of the coating
material, but the technology is different
 Boot Sector (Boot Record)
• A vital sector, disk will be unusable if this sector damages
• MBR at CHS 0, 0, 1 in hard disks, contains Partition Table
• Each partition has its own boot sector too
• Each operating system has its own boot sector format
• For Booting, Bootstrap Loader loads Boot Sector data it in a
particular address of memory (0000:7C00h) and sets the PC
• In hard disks, the small program in MBR attempts to locate
an active (bootable) partition in partition table
• If found, the boot record of that partition is read into memory
(location 0000:7C00) and runs
 DOS/Win Formatted Disk
• A DOS/Win formatted floppy/hard disk’s Boot Sector contains
– A jump and a NOP opcode
– BPB (BIOS Parameter Block)
- Sectors per cluster
- Number of Root directory entries
- Sectors per FAT
- Volume Label
- …
– A program, to load OS if bootable/show error msg if not in
floppies, to locate the active partition in hard disks
– Error messages
 Cluster
• Data units of disk must be addressed, which units belong
to which file / are free / are damaged (bad sectors) / …
• On disks having large capacity, purposing one sector as a
unit makes addressing table so large  Cluster is defined
• Represents the smallest amount of disk space that can be
allocated
• The smaller the cluster size, the more efficiently disk
space usage, the more number of bits to address one unit
• The number of sectors per cluster is stored in the
Boot Record
 FAT
• FAT-12/FAT-16/FAT-32 are Microsoft favorite File
Allocation Tables (before NTFS)
• FAT-12 uses 12 bits for addressing, a max. of 4096 units,
considering one sector as a cluster, 2MB can be addressed
• FAT-16 with max.(128) sectors/cluster (64KB cluster size
 wasting large amount of disk space) up to 4GB, this is
why Win95 cannot support more than 4GB partiotions
• FAT-32, the same system,
32 bit fields for addressing
 NTFS
• NT File System
• Better performance
• Less wasted space
• More security
• Supports all sizes of
clusters (512b - 64 KB)
• The 4 KB cluster is somehow standard
• Practically no partition size limitation
• Very flexible, all the system files can be relocated, except
the first 16 MFT (Master File Table) elements
 NTFS (cont’d)
• NTFS disk is symbolically divided into two parts
• The first 12% is assigned to MFT area
• The rest 88% represents usual space for files storage
• MFT area can simply reduce if needed, clearing the space for
recording files
• At clearing the usual area, MFT can be extended again
 Question
• Why are the bumps on the reflective layer of
the CD called pits?

• Do you know what a Boot Loader program is?

And how it works?