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In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of a
track Track or Tracks may refer to: Routes or imprints * Ancient trackway, any track or trail whose origin is lost in antiquity * Animal track, imprints left on surfaces that an animal walks across * Desire path, a line worn by people taking the shorte ...
on a magnetic disk or
optical disc In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc (OD) is a flat, usually circular disc that encodes binary data ( bits) in the form of pits and lands on a special material, often aluminum, on one of its flat surface ...
. Each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, traditionally 512
byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
s for
hard disk drives A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magn ...
(HDDs) and 2048 bytes for
CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both com ...
s and
DVD-ROM The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...
s. Newer HDDs use 4096-byte (4 
KiB The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...
) sectors, which are known as the
Advanced Format Advanced Format (AF) is any disk sector format used to store data on magnetic disks in hard disk drives (HDDs) that exceeds 512, 520, or 528 bytes per sector, such as the 4096, 4112, 4160, and 4224-byte (4  KB) sectors of an Advanced Format ...
(AF). The sector is the minimum storage unit of a hard drive. Most disk partitioning schemes are designed to have files occupy an integral number of sectors regardless of the file's actual size. Files that do not fill a whole sector will have the remainder of their last sector filled with zeroes. In practice, operating systems typically operate on blocks of data, which may span multiple sectors. Geometrically, the word
sector Sector may refer to: Places * Sector, West Virginia, U.S. Geometry * Circular sector, the portion of a disc enclosed by two radii and a circular arc * Hyperbolic sector, a region enclosed by two radii and a hyperbolic arc * Spherical sector, a po ...
means a portion of a disk between a center, two radii and a corresponding arc (see Figure 1, item B), which is shaped like a slice of a pie. Thus, the ''disk sector'' (Figure 1, item C) refers to the intersection of a ''track'' and geometrical ''sector''. In modern disk drives, each physical sector is made up of two basic parts, the sector header area (typically called "ID") and the data area. The sector header contains information used by the drive and controller; this information includes sync bytes, ''address identification'', flaw flag and error detection and correction information. The header may also include an alternate address to be used if the data area is undependable. The ''address identification'' is used to ensure that the mechanics of the drive have positioned the read/write head over the correct location. The data area contains the sync bytes, user data and an
error-correcting code In computing, telecommunication, information theory, and coding theory, an error correction code, sometimes error correcting code, (ECC) is used for controlling errors in data over unreliable or noisy communication channels. The central idea i ...
(ECC) that is used to check and possibly correct errors that may have been introduced into the data.


History

The first disk drive, the 1957 IBM 350 disk storage, had ten 100 character sectors per track; each character was six bits and included a parity bit. The number of sectors per track was identical on all recording surfaces. There was no recorded identifier field (ID) associated with each sector. The 1961 IBM 1301 disk storage introduced variable length sectors, termed records by IBM, and added to each record a record address field separate from the data in a record (sector). All modern disk drives have sector address fields, called ID fields, separate from the data in a sector. Also in 1961 Bryant with its 4000 series introduced the concept of zoned recording which allowed the number of sectors per track to vary as a function of the track's diameter - there are more sectors on an outer track than on an inner track. This became industry practice in the 1990s and is standard today. The disk drives announced with the
IBM System/360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applic ...
in 1964 detected errors in all fields of their sectors (records) with a
cyclic redundancy check A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is an error-detecting code commonly used in digital networks and storage devices to detect accidental changes to digital data. Blocks of data entering these systems get a short ''check value'' attached, based on ...
(CRC) replacing parity per character detection of prior generations. IBM's sectors (records) at this time added a third field to the physical sector, a key field to aid in searching for data. These IBM physical sectors, called records, have three basic parts, a Count field which acts as an ID field, a Key field not present in most disk drive sectors and a Data field, frequently called the CKD format for a record. The 1970 IBM 3330 disk storage replaced the CRC on the data field of each sector with an error correcting code (ECC) to improve data integrity by detecting most errors and allowing correction of many errors. Ultimately all fields of disk sectors had ECCs. Prior to the 1980s there was little standardization of sector sizes; disk drives had a maximum number of bits per track and various system manufacturers subdivided the track into different sector sizes to suit their OSes and applications. The popularity of the PC beginning in the 1980s and the advent of the IDE interface in the late 1980s led to a 512-byte sector becoming an industry standard sector size for HDDs and similar storage devices. In the 1970s IBM added fixed-block architecture
Direct Access Storage Device A direct-access storage device (DASD) (pronounced ) is a secondary storage device in which "each physical record has a discrete location and a unique address". The term was coined by IBM to describe devices that allowed random access to data, t ...
s (FBA DASDs) to its line of CKD DASD. CKD DASD supported multiple variable length sectors while the IBM FBA DASD supported sector sizes of 512, 1024, 2048, or 4096 bytes. In 2000 the industry trade organization, ''International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association'' ( IDEMA) started work to define the implementation and standards that would govern sector size formats exceeding 512 bytes to accommodate future increases in data storage capacities. By the end of 2007 in anticipation of a future IDEMA standard, Samsung and Toshiba began shipments of 1.8-inch hard disk drives with 4096 byte sectors. In 2010 IDEMA completed the
Advanced Format Advanced Format (AF) is any disk sector format used to store data on magnetic disks in hard disk drives (HDDs) that exceeds 512, 520, or 528 bytes per sector, such as the 4096, 4112, 4160, and 4224-byte (4  KB) sectors of an Advanced Format ...
standard for 4096 sector drives, setting the date for the transition from 512 to 4096 byte sectors as January 2011 for all manufacturers, and Advanced Format drives soon became prevalent.


Related units


Sectors versus blocks

While sector specifically means the physical disk area, the term ''block'' has been used loosely to refer to a small chunk of data. Block has multiple meanings depending on the context. In the context of data storage, a filesystem block is an abstraction over disk sectors possibly encompassing multiple sectors. In other contexts, it may be a unit of a data stream or a unit of operation for a utility. For example, the
Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...
program Program, programme, programmer, or programming may refer to: Business and management * Program management, the process of managing several related projects * Time management * Program, a part of planning Arts and entertainment Audio * Programm ...
dd allows one to set the block size to be used during execution with the parameter bs=bytes. This specifies the size of the chunks of data as delivered by dd, and is unrelated to sectors or filesystem blocks. In Linux, disk sector size can be determined with sudo fdisk -l , grep "Sector size" and block size can be determined with sudo blockdev --getbsz /dev/sda.


Sectors versus clusters

In computer
file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...
s, 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. On a disk that uses 512-byte sectors, a 512-byte cluster contains one sector, whereas a 4-
kibibyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
(
KiB The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...
) cluster contains eight sectors. A cluster is the smallest logical amount of disk space that can be allocated to hold a file. Storing small files on a filesystem with large clusters will therefore waste disk space; such wasted disk space is called slack space. For cluster sizes which are small versus the average file size, the wasted space per file will be statistically about half of the cluster size; for large cluster sizes, the wasted space will become greater. However, a larger cluster size reduces bookkeeping overhead and fragmentation, which may improve
reading Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch. For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process involving such areas as word recognition, orthography (spell ...
and writing speed overall. Typical cluster sizes range from 1 sector (512 B) to 128 sectors (64
KiB The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...
). A cluster need not be physically contiguous on the disk; it may span more than one
track Track or Tracks may refer to: Routes or imprints * Ancient trackway, any track or trail whose origin is lost in antiquity * Animal track, imprints left on surfaces that an animal walks across * Desire path, a line worn by people taking the shorte ...
or, if sector interleaving is used, may even be discontiguous within a track. This should not be confused with fragmentation, as the sectors are still logically contiguous. A "lost cluster" occurs when a file is deleted from the directory listing, but the
File Allocation Table File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons by ...
(FAT) still shows the clusters allocated to the file. The term ''cluster'' was changed to ''allocation unit'' in
DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...
4.0. However the term cluster is still widely used.


Zone bit recording

If a sector is defined as the intersection between a radius and a track, as was the case with early hard drives and most floppy disks, the sectors towards the outside of the disk are physically longer than those nearer the spindle. Because each sector still contains the same number of bytes, the outer sectors have lower bit density than the inner ones, which is an inefficient use of the magnetic surface. The solution is zone bit recording, wherein the disk is divided into zones, each encompassing a small number of contiguous tracks. Each zone is then divided into sectors such that each sector has a similar physical size. Because outer zones have a greater circumference than inner zones, they are allocated more sectors. This is known as zoned bit recording. A consequence of zone bit recording is that contiguous reads and writes are noticeably faster on outer tracks (corresponding to lower block addresses) than on inner tracks, as more bits pass under the head with each rotation; this difference can be 25% or more.


Advanced Format

In 1998 the traditional 512-byte sector size was identified as one impediment to increasing capacity which at that time was growing at a rate exceeding
Moore's Law Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empi ...
. Increasing the length of the data field through the implementation of Advanced Format using 4096-byte sectors removed this impediment; it increased the efficiency of the data surface area by five to thirteen percent while increasing the strength of the ECC which in turn allowed higher capacity. The format was standardized by an industry consortium in 2005 and by 2011 incorporated in all new products of all hard drive manufacturers.


See also

* CD-ROM format *
Count key data Count key data (CKD) is a direct-access storage device (DASD) data recording format introduced in 1964, by IBM with its IBM System/360 and still being emulated on IBM mainframes. It is a self-defining format with each data record represented by ...
*
Cylinder-head-sector Cylinder-head-sector (CHS) is an early method for giving addresses to each physical block of data on a hard disk drive. It is a 3D-coordinate system made out of a vertical coordinate ''head'', a horizontal (or radial) coordinate ''cylinder'', an ...
*
Disk formatting Disk formatting is the process of preparing a data storage device such as a hard disk drive, solid-state drive, floppy disk, memory card or USB flash drive for initial use. In some cases, the formatting operation may also create one or more new ...
*
Disk storage Disk storage (also sometimes called drive storage) is a general category of storage mechanisms where data is recorded by various electronic, magnetic, optical, or mechanical changes to a surface layer of one or more rotating disks. A disk drive is ...
*
File Allocation Table File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons by ...
(FAT) * Hard disk drive partitioning * Sector slipping


References

{{Reflist Computer file systems Units of information