This picture shows the five head assemblies of the DF32 disk drive. Each head assembly has 4 separate heads in it which are the dark lines in the white blocks. Below the heads are the head select boards. Four of the head assemblies are used to record the 16 data tracks. The remaining head assembly is used for the 2 timing tracks which encode bit locations and address. The platter is recorded with a spare set of timing tracks which can be selected by plugging in the read head data cable into the adjacent slot in the backplane. The timing tracks were written by a separate device, as the drive could only write to the data tracks.
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