European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - March 3, 1991, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Us air Muziii  car Tuoi 4 u Quot t Elj  of floppies take serious look at a hard drive Jerry Kidder a a. Isk operating systems or Dos have a a been the subject of our last columns i. M. And we will continue to Hack our m Way through the Jungle of bits and bytes this week. A. Serious computer users with lots of data quickly discover it s a chore to switch floppies in and out of the disk drive every time a new program if used or whenever the desired address or video list is on the floppy still in the Box. It May be time for them to Start thinking about the hard drive or fixed drive that their buddies Are using and bragging about. It s easy enough to find hard drive advertisements and to Start Reading about what a available. But what do the words mean a 1 a. The size of the drive is easy enough to figure out. One of the smart books that i refer to a Quot hard disk power�?T1 by Kris Jamsa a brings the megabyte numbers Down to typed pages. It says Quot that a la megabyte drive Wilt hold about 2,500 typed pages. A a just use this figure and you can see that at2-mb floppy would hold about about 300 pages and a 30-mb hard drive would hold about 7,500 pages. It s a Handy Way to visualize How much data can be packed onto one of those Little boxes with the a a blinking lights. A a hard drive is made up of several platters stacked in a sealed Box. Just As with a floppy drive each surface is divided into tracks a 20-mb drive has 615 tracks per Platter Side Wrath each a track divided into sectors. A cylinders have been added to the addressing to Speed up the accessing of data. Cylinders Are equivalent track positions on each Platter surface. This Means that track 1 on All Platter surfaces can be addressed As one address by simply changing the head address. The Heads do not physically have to be moved. The same formula can be used to figure out the storage capacity of a fixed drive As was use computers on a floppy drive. A hard drive that has 615 cylinders four Platter surfaces top and Bottom of the platter17 sectors 512 bytes per sector would equal 21,411,840 bytes or 20 megabytes. A done to forget that just As with a floppy drive Dos takes up some space and that is the difference Between the arithmetic and the actual area to store data another important measurement is average a Cess Riqie which is expressed in milliseconds or is. Access time is the time that starts when the operating system requests Arad , and ends when the data is ready to be transferred. In other words How quickly can the disk move the Heads to the right location and get ready to get the data. /. A Quot the Best numbers Are the smallest ones. A 23 a is Access time is better than a 65 is Access time. The Price goes up As the numbers go Down. If the user plans to do operations that Are Dis intensive such As heavy data base operations get Quick drive and pay the Price. For Standard operation such As word processing Normal data base lists for videos addresses of friends and playing games take the Middle course. There Are several different hard disk controllers that also affect Speed and Price. One Way to increase the capacity is to use a. Roll run length limited controller. Let it suffice. To say that Roll is a method to pack 50 percent More data onto a hard drive. A disk drive with a Mem this stands for modified frequency modulation and could be considered the Standard controller might have 20-mb space but with a Roll controller would be Able to store 30 Mega bytes in the same space.  one drawback with the Roll controller is that. Dos does no to directly recognize the increased packing of data per track More sectors so some disk related Utility programs will not work pop Erly. This might not be important to most users but should be kept in mind. A a. Also some disk drives might not be of High enough Quality to handle the extra data. So a a. Word to the Wise a be sure before you buy y e we ill discuss How to prepare and use your y disk drive in the next columns. Jerry Kidder is a stars and stripes computer technician a a feedback that do you think of the Media a coverage of the persian Gulf War staff sol John Campbell c co 5ih in St inf div Mainz Germany i think its been Good coverage so _ fur. They re coming up with and asking most of the questions people want to hear a a Jill Roberson Estee Lander representative Darmstadt Germany i have mixed feelings. We should knowl what happening but.  the  questions repeatedly. All they re going to get Are the same answers. A Quot warrant officer 1 Steve Kilgore b co 3rd in 4th aviation regt Fin them army Airfield Germany i think its pm recovered a Little bit. Some of the reporters arc trying to make a name for themselves by prying too much. On the other hand w e Are knowing w hat is going on that Day. It s a Good and bad. Quot. Spec. Brett Baker b co 11th signal in Kaiserslautern Germany its hard for the Media to do a Good Job with the army press escorts hanging around. The. Army this time is being More careful because of. Vietnam. Mary Ann Birmingham family member living in Nieder olm Germany i think its Fine now. In the beginning they gave away too much information location Wise. A a compiled by. Stars and stripes staff Page 6a. Quot Sundar