Olympus PCI Pentium II/Pentium III ISA Motherboard User’s Guide
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Standard Setup,
Continued
Entering Drive Parameters
You can also enter the hard disk drive parameters. The drive
parameters are:
Parameter
Description
Type
The number for a drive with certain identification
parameters.
Size
The formatted size 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).
Cylinders
The number of cylinders in the disk drive.
Heads
The number of heads.
Write
Precompensation
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.
Landing Zone
This number is the cylinder location where the heads
normally park when the system is shut down.
Sectors
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.
LBA Mode
LBA (Logical Block Addressing) is a method of
addressing data on a disk drive. In LBA mode, the
maximum drive capacity is 8.4GB.
Blk Mode
Block mode boosts IDE drive performance by increasing
the amount of data transferred. Only 512 bytes of data can
be transferred per interrupt if block mode is not used.
Block mode allows transfers of up to 64 KB per interrupt.
PIO Mode
IDE PIO mode programs timing cycles between the IDE
drive and the programmable IDE controller. As the PIO
mode increases, the cycle time decreases.
32Bit Mode
Hard disk drives connected to the computer via the ISA
bus transfer data 16 bits at a time. An IDE drive on the
PCI bus or VL-Bus can use a 32-bit data path.
Cont’d
