MOCD

35.2 PRELIMINARIES AND BASIC DEFINITIONS

The format and physical layout of recorded data on the storage medium as well as
certain operational aspects of disk drive mechanism will be described in the
present section.

The Concept of Track

The information on magnetic and optical disks is recorded along tracks. Typically,
a track is a narrow annulus at some distance r from the disk center, as shown in
Fig. 1. The width of the annulus is denoted by Wt, while the width of the guard
band, if any, between adjacent tracks is denoted by Wg.

The track-pitch is the center-to-center distance between neighboring tracks and is

therefore equal to Wt + Wg. A major difference between the magnetic floppy disk,
the magnetic hard disk, and the optical disk is that their respective track-pitches
are presently of the order of 100, 10, and 1 μm. Tracks may be fictitious entities,
in the sense that no independent existence outside the pattern of recorded marks
may be ascribed to them. This is the case, for example, with the compact audio
disk format where prerecorded marks simply define their own tracks and help
guide the laser beam during readout. In the other extreme are tracks that are
physically engraved on the disk surface before any data is ever recorded.
Examples of this type of track are provided by pregrooved WORM and
magnetooptical disks. Figure 2 shows micrographs from several recorded optical
disk surfaces. The tracks along which data is written are clearly visible in these
pictures.

It is generally desired to keep the read-write head stationery while the disk spins
and a given track is being read from or written onto. Thus, in an ideal situation,
not only should the track be perfectly circular, but also the disk must be precisely
centered on the spindle axis. In practical systems, however, tracks are neither
precisely circular, nor are they concentric with the spindle axis.

These eccentricity problems are solved in low-performance floppy drives by

making tracks wide enough to provide tolerance for misregistrations and
misalignments. Thus the head moves blindly to a radius where the track center is
nominally expected to be, and stays put until the reading or writing is over. By
making the head narrower than the track-pitch, the track center is allowed to
wobble around its nominal position without significantly degrading the
performance during readwrite operations. This kind of wobble, however, is
unacceptable in optical disk systems which have a very narrow track, about the
same size as the focused beam spot. In a typical situation arising in practice the
eccentricity of a given track may be as much as 50 μm, while the track-pitch is
only about 1 μm, thus requiring active track-following procedures.

A popular method of defining tracks on an optical disk is by means of pregrooves,

which are either etched, stamped, or molded onto the substrate. The space
between neighboring grooves is called land (see Fig. 3a). Data may be written in
the groove with the land acting as a guard band. Alternatively, the land may be
used for recording while the grooves separate adjacent tracks. The groove depth
is optimized for generating an optical signal sensitive to the radial position of the
read-write laser beam. For the push-pull method of track-error detection
(described in Sec. 35.5) the groove depth is in the neighborhood of l/8, where l is
the wavelength of the light beam.

In digital data storage each track is divided into small segments called sectors. A
sector is intended for the storage of a single block of data which is typically either
512 or 1024 bytes. The physical length of a sector is thus several millimeters. Each
sector is preceded by header information such as the identity of the sector,
identity of the corresponding track, synchronization marks, etc. The header
information may be preformatted onto the substrate, or it may be written directly
on the storage layer. Pregrooved tracks may be “carved” on the optical disk either
as concentric rings or as a single continuous spiral. There are certain advantages
to each format. A spiral track contains a succession of sectors without
interruption, whereas concentric rings may each end up with some empty space
that is too small to become a sector. Also, large files may be written onto (and
read from) spiral tracks without jumping to the next track, which is something
that occurs when concentric tracks are used. On the other hand, multiple-path
operations such as write-and-verify or erase-and-write which require two paths
each for a given sector, or still-frame video are more conveniently handled on
concentric-ring tracks.

Another suggested track format is based on the idea of a sampling servo. Here the
tracks are identified by occasional marks placed permanently on the substrate at
regular intervals, as shown in Fig. 3b. Details of track-following by the sampled-
servo scheme will follow shortly (see Sec. 35.5), suffice it to say at this point that
servo marks help the system identify the position of the focused spot relative to
the track center. Once the position is determined it is fairly simple to steer the
beam and adjust its position on the track.