Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In computer file systems, a cluster (sometimes also called allocation unit or block) is a unit of disk space allocation for files and directories.To reduce the overhead of managing on-disk data structures, the filesystem does not allocate individual disk sectors by default, but contiguous groups of sectors, called clusters.
The FAT file system is a file system used on MS-DOS and Windows 9x family of operating systems. [3] It continues to be used on mobile devices and embedded systems, and thus is a well-suited file system for data exchange between computers and devices of almost any type and age from 1981 through to the present.
Other vendors worked around the volume size limits imposed by the 16-bit sector entries by increasing the apparent size of the sectors the file system operated on. These logical sectors were larger (up to 8192 bytes) than the physical sector size (still 512 bytes) on the disk. The DOS-BIOS or System BIOS would then combine multiple physical ...
Microsoft-defined GPT attribute flags for BDPs [1]; Bit number Meaning 60: The volume is read-only and may not be mounted read-write. 62: The volume is hidden.
If the actual size of the disk exceeds the maximum partition size representable using the legacy 32-bit LBA entries in the MBR partition table, the recorded size of this partition is clipped at the maximum, thereby ignoring the rest of the disk. This amounts to a maximum reported size of 2 TiB, assuming a disk with 512 bytes per sector (see 512e).
The maximum NTFS volume size implemented in Windows XP Professional is 2 32 − 1 clusters, partly due to partition table limitations. For example, using 64 KB clusters, the maximum size Windows XP NTFS volume is 256 TB minus 64 KB. Using the default cluster size of 4 KB, the maximum NTFS volume size is 16 TB minus 4 KB.
Disk partitioning or disk slicing [1] is the creation of one or more regions on secondary storage, so that each region can be managed separately. [2] These regions are called partitions. It is typically the first step of preparing a newly installed disk after a partitioning scheme is chosen for the new disk before any file system is created.
Formerly, on disks formatted using the master boot record (MBR) partition layout, certain software components used hidden sectors of the disk for data storage purposes. For example, the Logical Disk Manager (LDM), on dynamic disks, stores metadata in a 1 MB area at the end of the disk which is not allocated to any partition.