Understanding Disk Terminology
Before going into the details of managing disks and storage, let’s review some definitions.
Physical drive The actual hard disk itself, including case, electronics, platters, and all that stuff. Not terribly important to the disk administrator.
Partition A portion of the hard disk. In many cases, this is the entire hard disk space, but it needn’t be.
Allocation unit The smallest unit of managed disk space on a hard disk or logical volume. Also called a cluster.
Primary partition A portion of the hard disk that’s been marked as a potentially bootable logical drive by an operating system. MS-DOS can support only a single primary partition, but Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 can support multiple ...
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