hard drive sectors vs. tracks

Solution 1:

Almost all modern hard drives report 63 sectors per track, because that's the maximum allowed by the BIOS specs.

This number (along with heads and cylinders) is of course fake and used only for compatibility addressing with very old programs. Internally they use a simple sector number starting from 0 (called LBA mode).

The real sector per track number is not only much larger, but it also varies depending on the distance from the spindle. See, for example, this page from the makers of HDDScan.

Solution 2:

No easy way to say - every hard drive is different and has different density, on top of this, there are obviously more the further away from the centre you are as the circles become wider.

Pick a model, and give a bit more information (such as the outer most circle) and I will try to help you further.

Solution 3:

As the disk spins, sectors travel under the read head at a rate that depends on the RPM of the disk. So the transfer rate is the rotation rate times the number of sectors in a track times the number of bytes in a sector.

(RPM / 60) * Sectors-per-track * bytes-per-sector = bytes-per-second