Sector
A division of a storage medium on a hard drive or diskette that is a wedge shaped section of one of the circular tracks. Each arc is a sector that usually holds 512 bytes of data, and is given a sector number for interleaving purposes. The term "sector" usually refers to the entire single arc. The size of sectors can be customized to maximize the storage area. For example, if a user stores smaller files, decreasing the sector size allows more files to fill the space without any leftover room. The illustration gives an example of what the sector would look like on a disk platter.
To view the Bytes/Sector, Sector/Track and Total Sectors of a hard drive in Windows use the System Information tool.
Bad sector, Boot sector, CHS, Hard drive terms, Hardware terms