Term of the Moment
facial recognition
Definition: cylinder
There are two or more platters on today's hard disk drives, and a cylinder is the total of every track with the same track number on every surface. On earlier floppy disks, a cylinder comprised the top and corresponding bottom track of the flexible plastic platter. See floppy disk.
Cylinder
The cylinder is the aggregate of the same track number on every platter. When storing data, the operating system fills an entire cylinder before moving to the next one. The access arm remains stationary until all tracks in the cylinder have been read or written.