the sector is the smallest unit. Disk controllers can introduce address translations to map logical to physical positions, e.g., zone bit recording stores fewer sectors in shorter (inner) tracks, physical disk formats are not necessarily cylindrical, and sector numbers in a track can be skewed.

Sectors

Floppy disks and controllers had used physical sector sizes of 128, 256, 512 and 1024 bytes (e.g., PC/AX), but formats with 512 bytes per physical sector became dominant in the 1980s.

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