FreeBSD6 Unleashed

Understanding Hard Disk Geometry

You’ll see a lot of references to “hard disk geometry” in the online tutorials that explain how to prepare your disks, and you’ll encounter this term every time you run fdisk (or the friendlier interfaces to fdisk that you use in this chapter). Fortunately, this is something that owners of newer hardware (that is, hardware manufactured after hard disks larger than 8GB were common) or owners of SCSI disks can skip or ignore. Disk geometry data is only there for informational purposes. The functional importance of this information is now no longer the administrator’s responsibility—it’s the hardware’s.

One of FreeBSD’s strengths, though, is that it will run efficiently even on older hardware that is considered obsolete ...