Disk Devices

From the perspective of Windows, a disk is a device that provides addressable long-term storage for blocks of data, which are accessed using file system drivers. In other words, each byte on the disk does not have its own address, but each block does have an address. These blocks are known as sectors and are the basic unit of storage and transfer to and from the device (in other words, all transfers must be a multiple of the sector size). Whether the device is implemented using rotating magnetic media (hard disk or floppy disk) or solid state memory (flash disk or thumb drive) is irrelevant.

Windows supports a wide variety of interconnect mechanisms for attaching a disk to a system, including SCSI, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), SATA ...

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