System Area Hard Disk Drive

The System Area (SA) is an area set aside by the manufacturer for the storage of critical parameters. This area is normally located on the outer edge of the disk consisting of reserved cylinders.

Since the parameters are critical to the operation of the drive, copies of this information also exist on the innermost cylinders and a location on the centre part of the disk.

The SA divides into sectors, and UBA1 blocks occupy three sectors and contain the bad block list.

UBA2 blocks occupy two sectors and contain information such as the drive ID and other parameters. You can expect to find information such as Serial Number, Firmware Overlay, P-List, G-List, Security Password, Factory Defaults, and System Logs.

If the primary SA becomes corrupted, then the drive has the capability to restore the data by reading one of the other copies on the disk.

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