What is cylinder in Linux?

The cylinder in Linux refers to a concept in the physical storage structure of the hard drive. It is a cylindrical area composed of one or more tracks. Each track contains multiple sectors. The main function of the cylinder is Provides a logical structure during hard drive addressing and access.

The operating system of this tutorial: Linux5.18.14 system, Dell G3 computer.

In Linux, cylinder refers to a concept in the physical storage structure of a hard drive. It is a cylindrical area composed of one or more tracks, each track containing multiple sectors.

In early hard drives, data storage was performed on a magnetic coating on the surface of the platter. To organize and manage data, a physical hard drive is divided into concentric tracks, and each track is further divided into sectors.

The cylinder is composed of tracks on each disk surface located at the same head position. That is, individual tracks located at the same head position can form a cylinder. In other words, the cylinder is a virtual cylinder perpendicular to the disk surface.

The main role of cylinder is to provide a logical structure during the addressing and access process of the hard drive. By using parameters such as cylinder number, head number, and sector number, the operating system can accurately locate the data on the disk and perform read or write operations.

However, it should be noted that with the development of technology, modern hard drives use more complex addressing schemes, such as Logical Block Addressing (LBA), which is accessed based on logical block numbers data instead of directly using physical parameters such as cylinders, heads, and sectors.

Therefore, in modern Linux systems, the concept of cylinder is no longer as commonly used or directly reflected in the level of operating hard disks as it used to be. However, the concept of cylinder may still be mentioned in some low-level disk management tools or hard disk-related documentation.

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