What is a Hard Disk Drive?
A hard drive is a 3.5″ or 2.5″ square metal box that is contained within many desktop and laptop computers.
The drive contains a magnetic flat circular plate, normally made of aluminium or glass and contains a magnetic coating. This plate is used to store the data, through magnetic charge and is named the platter. The magnetic charge contained on the platter is read by the head which moves across it depending upon the location of the data.
What is Cylinder Head Sector (CHS) Addressing?
Cylinder-Head-Sector is the early method to provide an address to each physical block of data within a computer hard drive.
The system is formed of the head (this reads the data on the disk and can write to it) that selects the platter (a circular disk).
The platter contains tracks that exist in the same location on every disk surface and those same tracks over multiple tracks combined form a cylinder, basically, concentric circles around the centre of the disk(s) within the hard drive.
A sector is the smallest area of data that the head can read or write from on a hard drive and divides each track.
Each sector often had a data capacity of 512 bytes, though now can vary.
Though now replaced by LBA addressing, this information can be used on early hard drives to calculate its actual data capacity.
By multiplying the number of cylinders x the number of heads x the number of sectors x 512 bytes, it is possible to identify the capacity of the drive.
The number of cylinders, heads and sectors are often displayed on the manufacturers label present on the drive.
This method of addressing became obsolete as the maximum that it could support was a hard drive capacity of 8.4 GB due to a hard drive having a limit of 255 heads, 1023 cylinders and 63 sectors (255x1023x63x512 = 8,414,461,440 bytes or 8.4 GB).
About Athena Forensics
For information on our digital forensic services or if you require any advice or assistance please contact a member of our team on 0330 123 4448 or via email on enquiries@athenaforensics.co.uk, further details are available on our contact us page.
Our client’s confidentiality is of the utmost importance. All correspondence is treated with discretion, from initial contact to the conclusion of any mobile phone or computer forensic investigation.
Our digital forensics experts are fully aware of the significance and importance of the information that they encounter and we have been accredited to ISO 9001 for 10 years.
Our forensic experts are all security cleared and we offer non-disclosure agreements if required. Our premises along with our security procedures have been inspected and approved by law enforcement agencies.
Athena Forensics do not disclose personal information to other companies or suppliers.
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