DISK LANDING ZONES

6/22/2008

Disk Landing zones are special areas of hard disks designed to permit disk read/write heads to be safely parked. Landing on a recording surface of early disks was likely to damage both the heads and the recording surfaces. Early PC hard drives required that the read/write heads be explicitly parked on a safe surface by software. The track ID of the landing zone was stored in the disk data tables. Disk drives made after about 1990 park the heads automatically when power is removed from the drive.

Some drives use other techniques. For example, as spinning stops, IBM moves the head to a parking track that contains a parking ramp. This holds the head clear of the recording surfaces even when there is no power on the drive.