Difference between blocks and sectors - Stack Overflow
stackoverflow.com › questions › 12345804Sep 10, 2012 · Most hard drives shipped with 512 byte sector/block sizes. However, as discussed earlier, small blocks mean more metadata. With drive sizes now in the 3+ terabyte range, with 512 byte blocks, you had to have metadata storage for 3TB/512 bytes = 6.44 billion blocks. That's one major waste of space. So now they ship drives with 4k blocks, 8 times larger, so you only need metadata storage for 805 million blocks. The total number of possible files has been cut by a factor of 8, but the reduced ...
Disk sector - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_sectorWhile 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 program ddallows one to set the block size to be use…