Hard sectoring in a magnetic

Magnetic storage

Magnetic storage and magnetic recording are terms from engineering referring to the storage of data on a magnetized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetization in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is accessed using...

 or optical data storage device

Data storage device

thumb|200px|right|A reel-to-reel tape recorder .The magnetic tape is a data storage medium. The recorder is data storage equipment using a portable medium to store the data....

 is a form of sector

Disk sector

In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. Each sector stores a fixed amount of user data. Traditional formatting of these storage media provides space for 512 bytes or 2048 bytes of user-accessible data per sector...

ing which uses a physical mark or hole in the recording medium to reference sector locations.

In older 8- and 5¼-inch floppy disk

Floppy disk

A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles...

s, hard sectoring was implemented by punching "sector holes" in the disk to mark the start
of each sector. These were equally spaced holes, at a common radius. This was in addition to the "index hole", situated between two sector holes, to mark the start of the entire "track" of sectors. When the index or sector hole was recognized by an optical sensor, a sector signal was generated. Timing electronics or software would use the faster timing of the index hole between sector holes, to generate an index signal. Data read and write is faster in this technique than soft sectoring as no operations are to be performed regarding the starting and ending points of tracks.

Storage formats using hard sectoring

• 32 sector 8-inch floppy disks
• 10 sector and 16 sector 5¼-inch floppy disks
• Numerous magneto-optical formats
• DVD-RAM
  DVD-RAM
  DVD-RAM is a disc specification presented in 1996 by the DVD Forum, which specifies rewritable DVD-RAM media and the appropriate DVD writers. DVD-RAM media have been used in computers as well as camcorders and personal video recorders since 1998.-Design:DVD-RAM is one of three competing...