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I am not very familiar with secondary storage technicality, i.e., hardware specifics of secondary storage mediums like USB, floppy, hard drive, solid-state-drive, CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, etc.

I know there are sectors, I've heard the familiary with the terms, i.e., tracks, heads, etc.

I also know floppy drives are simple, and Wikipedia is useful, but not in a peculiar manner of "learning", more for "references" once you already have the basics down pat.

I want to know if there's some book or article or anything really that will deeply explain the details of, say, a floppy disk. I know it has two sides, holds 1.44 megabytes, but I don't get the sectors and tracks part.

Considering I need to know this information, I could use some pointers here(no pun on the data type intended).

LieutenantHacker wrote:I am not very familiar with secondary storage technicality, i.e., hardware specifics of secondary storage mediums like USB, floppy, hard drive, solid-state-drive, CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, etc.

I know there are sectors, I've heard the familiary with the terms, i.e., tracks, heads, etc.

I also know floppy drives are simple, and Wikipedia is useful, but not in a peculiar manner of "learning", more for "references" once you already have the basics down pat.

I want to know if there's some book or article or anything really that will deeply explain the details of, say, a floppy disk. I know it has two sides, holds 1.44 megabytes, but I don't get the sectors and tracks part.

Considering I need to know this information, I could use some pointers here(no pun on the data type intended).

What do you want to do exactly? As far as I know, there isn't a single reference for all that information. The only references that get nearest are the ones to program the different controllers, information about CHS and LBA, and filesystems. Given that there isn't such a good single book, it will do you no good to try to learn all those concepts if you don't have something concrete to achieve, such as implementing read functions for a specific filesystem (FAT32 LBA for instance) and for a specific device (for instance an ATA hard disk).

I have seen that the books about SCSI Multimedia Commands and related ATA/ATAPI documents have several nice schematics explaining the physical structure of CDs/DVDs, but not down to an industrial level. Just enough to understand how reading, burning, and some error correction works, mainly.

It looks like the way you are asking this is too broad.

For instance, an 1.44 MB floppy disk has 2880 sectors total. A track is just a "ring" made up of sectors at one side of the disk. The cylinder is just the combined tracks from all of the sides of a disk (2 sides in this case). There are 80 tracks/cylinders in a floppy, and each of them has 18 sectos (yes, it means that sectors from the outermost part of the disk are physically taking up more space than innermost ones, and that there could be more space if the floppy was built differently, formatted physically more asymmetrically).

So you should specify what you will do next in concrete terms. The information is there, but it will take too much time to make it useful if you don't really know how to put it to good use in the short term.

Well, I strictly want to know more about the device in depth about it for a better knowledge in read and write cycles, and to know how files as opposed to just a simple byte is stored within the abstraction of a filesystem.

Modern Operating Systems (Tanenbaum) is a great book.

E-series collection management is the one of the best book.