Dig that mixed up square disc - find out what makes it tick
By Mike Cook
THE words disc and disc drive are often used when talking about
computers, but I wonder how many people really know what makes
a disc drive work?
By understanding the physical nature of discs and disc drives
you will be more able to cope with the situation when things start
to go wrong.
A disc storage system is a fast and convenient way to store
programs and data.
The large mainframe computers (and some expensive small computers)
use hard discs.
These are made of rigid aluminium and require a very precise
drive mechanism as well as very clean air to operate in.
Most micros use flexible or floppy discs. These have a much
smaller capacity for storing data and are much slower.
Generally they are more than adequate for the single user, as
they are cheaper and require less finicky conditions than the
hard discs.
The first point to strike a newcomer when looking at discs is
the unmistakable fact that they are SQUARE! A moment's inspection
will reveal that, inside the square envelope, there is a round
disc made of a thin plastic (milar).
Coated on the plastic is a dark brown (sometimes black) layer
of magnetic material. This is usually some form of metal oxide,
ferric being the most common.
The coating is just like the one you get on tapes, so you can
see a disc is a cross between a long playing record and a tape.
Do you remember the old riddle: "How many grooves are there
on a long playing record?"
The answer, of course, is two — one on the front and one on
the back.
For a floppy disc however, there are no physical grooves. Data
is stored as a series of tracks (see Figure I).
Figure I: The structure of a formatted disc
The tracks are concentric rings of data. All tracks hold the
same amount of data despite those on the outside being longer
than those on the inside.
Some computers do have different amounts of data on different
tracks but most are like the BBC Micro and have the same.
This simplifies the disc filing system and, as outer tracks
tend to be more frequently used, it also slightly increases reliability.
Normally only one side of a floppy disc is used, but you can
get drives that will use both sides.
The disc drive is the "record player", a device to
read and write data. The components of one are shown in Figure
II.
Figure II: Major mechanical components of a disc drive. The
drive motor has been omitted for clarity.
Basically it consists of a drive motor to rotate the disc inside
its envelope. It does this by gripping the centre of the disc.
Some discs have a thin plastic re-inforcing hub at the centre
to improve the grip and give a longer disc life.
Once the disc is spinning the read/write head is moved across
the surface to position itself over the correct track.
The head is usually moved by means of a stepping motor. This
is a motor that moves through a small angle, usually 7.5 degrees,
every time it receives a pulse.
The rotational movement of the motor is converted into lateral
head movement by a helical worm gear.
Thus the head can be moved with precision over the surface of
the disc.
However, when the drive is switched on the head can be in any
position, so there must be some way of finding precisely where
it is.
This is usually done by a small micro switch which is tripped
by the head when it is over track zero. The computer will keep
issuing pulses to step the head backwards until this switch is
tripped. This is known as restoring the head.
In order for the computer to find a precise position on any
track, it must be given a signal at a fixed point on every disc
rotation. This is provided by the small index hole near the rim
of the disc.
Once every revolution this hole allows light through from an
LED to a photoelectric sensor. This sends a pulse to the computer
to indicate the start of the track.
Another photo sensor detects a notch on the outside of the disc's
envelope. This is the write protect notch, and it can be covered
up if you do not want to write onto the disc.
This will prevent accidents, as the software always looks at
the signal from these sensors before performing any write operation.
There is also a head load actuator, a small lever controlled
by an electromagnet. On the end of the lever is a small felt pad
which pushes the disc against the read/write head.
This reduces disc wear by ensuring the disc is in contact with
the head only when it needs to be.
On some disc units this actuator is very noisy and it may be
heard clunking away while the disc is being accessed. This is
not however a sign of a bad drive, merely a characteristic of
the design.
In addition to the mechanical parts, a disc drive contains the
electronics required to turn the motors on and off as well as
reading and writing to the disc.
These electronics communicate with the computer over the disc
bus. A bus is just a series of signal wires used to connect several
devices together.
Most disc drives stick to a standard bus layout on the edge
connector at the back of the drive. This means that manufacturers
can have their own design of disc drive electronics and still
be compatible with other people's products.
The standard disc bus is shown in Table I. As more than one
disc drive can be connected to a bus each drive must be assigned
a number. This is done by making a link on the electronics board.
|
STANDARD DISC DRIVE BUS
|
|
Pin
|
Use
|
|
2
|
Not connected
|
|
4
|
Not connected
|
|
6
|
Not connected
|
|
8
|
Index pulse (start of a track)
|
|
10
|
Drive select 1
|
|
12
|
Drive select 2
|
|
14
|
Drive select 3 (not used on BBC)
|
|
16
|
Motor on (spin disc)
|
|
18
|
R/W Head direction select
|
|
20
|
Step (a pulse causes head movement)
|
|
22
|
Data to be written
|
|
24
|
Write gate (enables data to be written)
|
|
26
|
Track zero switch
|
|
28
|
Write protect notch is covered
|
|
30
|
Mixed data and clock read from the disc
|
|
32
|
Surface select (for double sided drives)
|
|
34
|
Not connected
|
|
Note all the odd numbers are on the other side of the edge
connector and carry the signal ground (or earth).
|
Table I
Each drive on the bus must have a unique number to prevent more
than one drive being active at any one time.
The signals on the bus marked SELECT will therefore activate
only one drive. The other signals convey information we have already
covered.
At the computer end of the disc bus there is the disc controller
chip.
This is a very complex device. It accepts command numbers from
the computer's microprocessor and generates the sequence of pulses
on the disc bus to enable the disc drive to carry out the required
action.
This is because the microprocessor is not fast enough to perform
these actions by itself.
For example, the microprocessor can simply issue a command to
move the read/write head to track 10. The disc controller chip
then looks to see where the head is, and works out how many steps,
and in what direction they will be needed to get to track 10.
It then issues that number of head step pulses.
Finally, when the head is in position it reads the track identification
number to confirm it is at the correct track. Having completed
the task it then reports back to the microprocessor that the move
has been made successfully.
If the move was not a success this fact is reported and it is
up to the disc filing system software to take appropriate action.
Usually the head is restored (moved to track zero) and another
attempt is made. Several such attempts may be made before the
disc filing system signals an error.
Just then I mentioned the track identification number. This
is information that is put onto the disc during the formatting
procedure which every disc has to go through before it can be
used. This writes on the disc track and sector information.
We have already seen that a track is a ring of data stored on
the disc, but this is too large a chunk of storage to be convenient.
This is because disc storage would have to be allocated in tracks,
thus wasting a lot of space.
To remedy this, each track is broken down into a number of sectors.
A sector is the smallest unit of storage the disc holds, and all
data transfer to and from the disc is done with sectors of data.
In the BBC Micro each track contains 10 sectors and each sector
can hold 256 bytes (characters) of data.
Each sector has a few bytes of sector identification information
before the actual data. This is shown in Figure III.
Figure III: The composition of a sector
The CRC information is a Cyclic Redundancy Check, a simple method
of testing the data for errors.
When data is written onto a track the disc controller chip calculates
a 16 bit number from this data. This occupies the two CRC bytes
and is written after the data.
When reading back the data the CRC is also calculated and compared
with the CRC originally written with the data. If these are the
same it is assumed there is no error.
However, if they are different then there has definitely been
an error. The method used by the disc controller chip to calculate
the CRC value is shown on page 399 of the User Guide.
In order for the start of a sector to be uniquely identified,
a special code is written on the track - it is known as a mark.
You will see in Figure III that there is an identification mark
and a data mark.
In order for us to understand exactly what a mark is, we must
first see how normal data is stored on the disc.
It is stored in serial form just like the cassette tape system.
But instead of the logic zeros and ones being represented by audio
tones they are represented by a system of pulses.
Each pulse is represented by a magnetic field placed on the
disc by the read/write head. Figure IV shows the form that one
byte takes. Note that, unlike the tape system, there are no start
and stop bits.
Figure IV: Data encoding
This is known as synchronous data, as opposed to the tape's
asynchronous system and it allows more data to be packed into
a limited space.
However, before we can make any sense of data in this form the
disc controller chip needs to synchronise to it.
This is easily achieved by using clock pulses in every byte
of data. The pulses are also needed due to the nature of magnetism
- if they were not included the data could not always be correctly
recovered.
Each bit starts with a clock pulse and if the bit is a logic
one there is a data pulse in the middle of the bit time. There
is a limit as to how fast these pulses can be put onto the disc
so the capacity of the disc is fixed.
The electronics surrounding the disc controller chip separate
the clock pulses and the data pulses from the mixed stream which
is read back off the disc.
A mark byte is a byte where some clock pulses are missing.
If you consider the clock component in a normal byte to be &FF
(that is all ones, a clock pulse every time) then a mark will
have a different number associated with the clock component.
There are a number of standard mark signals and these are shown
in Table II. Remember that for normal data the clock component
is always &FF. It just differs for the marks.
|
STANDARD MARKS
|
|
Clock pattern
|
Data pattern
|
Type of mark
|
|
(Hex)
|
(Hex)
|
|
|
D7
|
FC
|
Index mark indicates sector start
|
|
C7
|
FE
|
Sector ID mark
|
|
C7
|
FB
|
Data mark
|
|
C7
|
F8
|
Deleted data mark
|
Table II
The disc controller automatically copes with the marks when finding
a specific sector.
There are two types of data marks. The first indicates there
is data in the sector and the second indicates the data in the
sector has been deleted.
This means to delete data you just have to change the data mark
and not the data. The disc controller chip has special commands
for reading data and deleted data. So sometimes, if you have the
right software tools, it is possible to recover a deleted file.
The index mark is used at the start of each track and is placed
just after the index hole has passed the detector.
Before each block of information there are the "sync bytes"
that synchronise the decoder inside the disc controller chip.
These six bytes are always data bytes with a hex value of 00.
This method of coding the bits in terms of pulses is not particularly
efficient. Its main advantage, however, is that it is easy to
separate data pulses and clock pulses, and also marks are easy
to generate.
There is another way of encoding bits using fewer pulses and,
as there are fewer, more bits can be put on any one track.
It is known as double density encoding and must not be confused
with double track density, which is merely the result of the tracks
being closer together.
The disc controller chip in the BBC Micro will not cope with
double density encoding. However plug-in boards are available
which allow the BBC Micro to cope with it. The method of double
density encoding is shown in Figure V.
Figure V: Double-density data format
It might seem a little difficult at first to see what is going
on. Normally the clock pulse is missing and only the data pulse
is present.
However, when the bit is a logic zero AND the previous bit was
also a logic zero there is a clock pulse at the start of the bit
time.
This keeps up the minimum number of pulses needed to keep the
magnetic material happy.
You can see that in any one bit there are half the number of
pulses, and so we have double the density.
Separation of the data from the clock pulses is complex and
requires the use of a circuit known as a phase locked loop. This
circuit would require a whole article just to explain, so we are
better off skipping that!
If you remember that discs store data in the form of magnetic
pulses you can probably predict how to handle them.
Basically, don't touch the magnetic surface of the disc, as
the grease from your finger will damage the head.
Don't put the disc near any magnetic fields as this will remove
the magnetic pulses. Someone I know had a loudspeaker perched
on top of his disc drive with the effect that most of the data
was rubbed out when the drive made its first rotation.
Discs should not be subjected to extremes of temperature, and
although they are floppy it does not mean they should be flopped.
Particles of smoke, not to mention cigarette ash, are also quite
lethal to a disc.
Given reasonable care a disc should last at least five years
of normal use, and some manufacturers guarantee their products
for a lifetime. (The lifetime of what they do not say — the disc,
perhaps?)
