Inside Solaris™ 9

Disk Slices

Disks are divided into regions called disk slices or disk partitions. A slice is composed of a single range of contiguous blocks. It is a physical subset of the disk (except for slice 2, which represents the entire disk). A UNIX file system is built within these disk slices. The boundaries of a disk slice are defined when a disk is formatted by using the Solaris format utility, and the slice information for a particular disk can be viewed by using the prtvtoc command. Each disk slice appears to the operating system (and to the system administrator) as though it were a separate disk drive.

Note

Solaris device names use the term slice (and the letter s in the device name) to refer to the slice number. Slices were called partitions ...