6.1. Disks, Partitions, and Volumes
The term disk is used to refer to physical media such as IDE or SCSI drives, as well as to removable media disks such as USB drives and CD-ROM or DVD disks. A disk is logically thought to consist of multiple clusters that are specified in terms of the amount of data that a cluster can store—for example, 512 bytes, 1,024 bytes, 4,096 bytes. The term disk is always used to refer to a physical entity that one can touch and feel. In contrast, the terms partition and volume, explained in the next couple of paragraphs, represent logical concepts.
For administrative purposes, some disks (but not all)[1] may be divided into multiple logical divisions called partitions. Each partition has a capacity specified in the ...
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