The present invention compensates for variations in the angular velocity of the drive's spindle motor by periodically dropping clocks to a counter based upon the previous servo wedge-to-wedge timing. This enables a substantially constant count to be maintained between servo wedges and allows a more predictable generation of the data sector pulses. A more predictable generation of the data sector pulses enables the size of the guard band preceding each data sector to be decreased and the capacity of the disk to be correspondingly increased.