Storage Terminology

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

• Disks are a physical storage device such as a hard disk, a 3.5-inch floppy disk, or a CD-ROM.

• A disk is divided into sectors, addressable blocks of fixed size. Sector sizes are determined by hardware. Most hard disk sectors are 512 bytes, and CD-ROM sectors are typically 2048 bytes.

• Partitions are collections of contiguous sectors on a disk. A partition table or other diskmanagement database stores a partition's starting sector, size, and other characteristics and is located on the same disk as the partition.

• Simple volumes are objects that represent sectors from a single partition that file system drivers manage as a single unit.

• Multipartition volumes are objects that represent sectors from multiple partitions and that file system drivers manage as a single unit. Multipartition volumes offer performance, reliability, and sizing features that simple volumes do not.