Disk Organization

Disk organization refers to the manner in which the disk drive is organized for storage of data. Some related terms are discussed.

Disk Storage Capacity

It refers to the amount of data that a disk drive can store. It is measured in Megabyte or Gigabyte (MB, GB).

Boot Record

It is present on the first sector also called as the boot sector of a disk drive, from where the operating system starts to be loaded into the memory when the computer is started.

Disk partitioning

It is the process of creating primary and extended partitions on the disk drive. These partitions are logical division of the disk drive that can be used for formatting for use by a file system. Different partitions are required for better utilization of disk drive’s storage capacity and backup of critical information.

File Allocation Table (FAT)

It is a file system used by MS-DOS and MS-WINDOWS. As per the name, it is a table, which stores information about sectors of disk, which all are occupied by a file or not. With the help of FAT, operating system is able to locate a file and do processing as instructed. Since, it is very important, MS-DOS keeps another duplicate copy of FAT, which will be used if the first FAT gets corrupted. FAT also stores details of damaged sectors of a disk.

Memory Capacity

It refers to the amount of data a storage device can hold. It is measured in KB or MB or GB.

Access time

It is time measured in milliseconds to access a data element for a storage device.

Memory Address

Generally, in a personal computer data is stored in storage locations termed as address or memory address. The computer process the data by accessing data by the memory address where data is present.