Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 2

Storage Terminology

To fully understand the rest of this chapter, you need to be familiar with some basic terminology:

• Disks are physical storage devices such as a hard disk, CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-ray, solid state disk (SSD), or flash.

• A disk is divided into sectors, which are addressable blocks of fixed size. Sector sizes are determined by hardware. Most hard disk sectors are 512 bytes (but are moving to 4,096 bytes), and CD-ROM sectors are typically 2,048 bytes. For more information on moving to 4,096-byte sectors, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2510009.

• Partitions are collections of contiguous sectors on a disk. A partition table or other disk-management database stores a partition’s starting sector, size, and other characteristics and is located ...