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In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. For most disks, each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, traditionally 512 bytes for hard disk drives (HDDs), and 2048 bytes for CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs and BD-ROMs. [1]
Floppy disks and controllers had used physical sector sizes of 128, 256, 512 and 1024 bytes (e.g., PC/AX), but formats with 512 bytes per physical sector became dominant in the 1980s. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] The most common physical sector size for hard disks today is 512 bytes, but there have been hard disks with 520 bytes per sector as well for non-IBM ...
For simplicity and maximum performance, the logical sector size is often identical to a disk's physical sector size, but can be larger or smaller in some scenarios. The minimum allowed value for non-bootable FAT12/FAT16 volumes with up to 65,535 logical sectors is 32 bytes, or 64 bytes for more than 65,535 logical sectors.
Other vendors worked around the volume size limits imposed by the 16-bit sector entries by increasing the apparent size of the sectors the file system operated on. These logical sectors were larger (up to 8192 bytes) than the physical sector size (still 512 bytes) on the disk. The DOS-BIOS or System BIOS would then combine multiple physical ...
If the actual size of the disk exceeds the maximum partition size representable using the legacy 32-bit LBA entries in the MBR partition table, the recorded size of this partition is clipped at the maximum, thereby ignoring the rest of the disk. This amounts to a maximum reported size of 2 TiB, assuming a disk with 512 bytes per sector (see 512e).
The sector unit is the smallest size of data to be stored in a hard disk drive, and each file will have many sector units assigned to it. The smallest entity in a CD is called a frame, which consists of 33 bytes and contains six complete 16-bit stereo samples (two bytes × two channels × six samples = 24 bytes).
(B) Geometrical sector (C) Track sector (D) Cluster. A disk drive track is a circular path on the surface of a disk or diskette on which information is magnetically recorded and from which recorded information is read. A track is a physical division of data in a disk drive, as used in the Cylinder-Head-Record (CCHHR) addressing mode of a CKD disk.
For hard disk drives working in the 4K native mode, there is no emulation layer in place, and the disk media directly exposes its 4096, 4112, 4160, or 4224-byte physical sector size to the system firmware and operating system. That way, the externally visible logical sectors organization of the 4K native drives is directly mapped to their ...