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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]
Common floppy disk formats, logical characteristics by platform Platform Size Density Sides Tracks/ side Sectors/ track Bytes/ sector Sectoring Capacity rpm Encoding Note Acorn: 5 1 ⁄ 4 inch Single 1 40 10 256 soft 100 kB 300 FM 80 200 kB Double 1 40 16 256 160 kB MFM 80 320 kB 2 640 kB 3 1 ⁄ 2 inch Double 2 80 16 256 640 kB 300 MFM
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 ...
Still later, magnetic hard disks employed an evolution of LBA where the size of the addressable disk sectors can differ from the physical block size. For example, Advanced Format (AF) 512e HDDs use 4096-byte physical sectors, while their firmware provides emulation for a virtual sector size of 512 bytes; thus, "512e" stands for "512-byte ...
Variables included the size of media (nominal 8-inch, 5 + 1 ⁄ 4-inch, 3 + 1 ⁄ 2-inch and others), encoding of data on the media (FM, MFM, M²FM, GCR), the number of disk tracks, one or two sides, the number of sectors in each track, and hard- or soft-sectoring. Even media that was physically interchangeable between two systems might not ...
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.
(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.
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).