drive notes

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Terminology

Microsoft seems to use cluster synonymously with block. I'm not sure they are exactly the same. The smallest amount that can be allocated in VFAT is a "cluster", which is greater than or equal to at least 1 sector... again, is cluster the same as a block here? UNIX people never use cluster in the context of drives unless they are talking about data storage clusters.

The number of sectors on a device is hardware dependent. Historically, a sector contains 512 bytes for magnetic media and 2048 bytes for optical media. Remember, this is the hardware level view of the media. Starting in 2011 most manufacturers will standardize on 4096 bytes as the size of a sector for magnetic media.

The filesystem view uses "blocks" as the smallest amount that may be allocated. For Linux ext3 the default is 4096 bytes per block.