How can I tell how many platters my hard drive has?

[JohnPaul]

I have two Maxtor 80 Gig 7200 RPM HDs, and I read that there are three versions of the plus 9 series drives. There are some that shipped with 60,66, and 80 gig platters on the drives, and apparently there is no way to tell until you get it out of the box what type you got. Even now I don't know how to tell. Does anyone here know how to tell what size my platters are? TIA

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

two if it's a 40GB platter.

1 if its an 80GB platter.

I would assume its probably two.

 

[thorin]

Check the serial number or model/revision number against a list on their site or maybe storagereview.com

Thorin

 

[JohnPaul]

No, they only came with 60,66, and 80gig platters. That I know. I just need to know how to tell which size platters I have, as these drives all didnt ship with the same size due to manufacturing issues at Maxtor I believe.

 

[JohnPaul]

Good idea thorin. I will try that.

 

[Lynx516]

you have 2 80Gb Maxtors. the only number you specify that can divide into 80Gb is 80Gb therefore you have 1 80Gb Platter.

 

[JohnPaul]

Yes, but it does not actually have to divide into it, because I know that they had 160 gig with 66gig platters, which I guess they put 2 66 gig platters and then a smaller 40 gig platter, shortchanging the drive, so I have no idea what to expect. Then again, that's just something I read somewhere, so who knows.

 

[Matthias99]

You'd have to use 3 66-gig platters and chop either part of the last one or a bit of all of them. AFAIK there are no drives that use differently sized platters. Using only part of the platters is called "short-stroking" a drive, and sometimes models like this are preferable for performance reasons (since the read heads don't have to move as far on average, the seek times are usually a bit lower). You can get the same effect by using a defragmentation or disk optimizer program to place frequently-used files on the outer part of the disk, and cluster them based on access patterns, but doing it at the drive level doesn't require any sort of software support.

Edit: As far as actually telling you what kind of disks you'd have, you'd need to get the info from the manufacturer (or a site that got the info from the manufacturer).

 

[WobbleWobble]

The manufacturer does not have to utilize all the space on a platter. So a 120GB can have 2x 66GB platters and disable 6GB off each platter to give 120GB.

And JohnPaul, there was an X-Bit Labs article on this a while ago. They mentioned it was possible to tell the number of platters by the serial number. It was also possible to tell via benchmarks.

Let me try and find that article.

Edit: X-Bit Labs article

 

[JohnPaul]

From that article and the numbers on my drive, I have two drives both with 80gig platters, which is fine by me.