How is a REAL Atari disk organized?
Atari disks, like nearly all other floppy disk computers, uses a system of ‘tracks’ and ‘sectors’ to physically organize data on magnetic disks. Typically an Atari disk will contain 40 ‘tracks’. Each of these ‘tracks’ is a thin concentric circular area on the disk, larger at the edges of the disk, smaller at the hub. The computer in the Atari disk drive typically divides each of these circles up into 18 separate parts called ‘sectors’. Each sector can hold 128 bytes of your data. All of this complexity is of course hidden from you for ease of use, and what you typically see is a formatted diskette that can simply store 720 sectors of data. This is the layout typically called ‘Single Density’ by Atari users, and is produced by the Atari 810 and compatible drives. Enhanced drives can produce a variety of other formats, some which can store more data.
