IBM called the first hard drive to use that design the Model 3030. Because of the similarity between its model number and the caliber of the famous Winchester rifle, the drive and its successors came to be known as Winchester drives. Cylinders are themselves divided into areas called sectors. Operating systems write data to drives according to addresses established by those divisions. The faster a platter rotates, the more data a recording head can read in a given amount of time.
Some drives provide multiple heads that hover over different areas of the same platter.
Such a design reduces the distance that a head must move to access data but also introduces an added period of delay, called head settling time, in which the additional heads stop shaking. Large file transfers, in particular, often benefit from cache. Depending on your drive, you may be able to customize your cache to specify the amount of space allotted for reading and writing, for example. Usually, however, those values are preset by drive makers to fit their own visions of optimization. Choose an LCD value with care.