•Older
MFM and RLL technologies
§Have 17 or 26 sectors per track over entire drive
platter
§All tracks contain same number of bytes
•IDE
drives use zone bit recording formatting system
§Number of sectors per track is not same throughout
platter
§Tracks near center have smallest number of sectors per track
§OS cannot communicate with IDE drive by contacting hard drive controller BIOS and using sector/track coordinates