What are the criteria that determine the optimum size of a sector? Are these criteria permanent or do they change with time? What other developments in computing affect the answer to this question?
What will be an ideal response?
First we have to say why we need sectors. Without sectors, the basic unit of data would be the track. That is too large a quantity of data. If you have small files, and the minimum file size were a sector, much disk space would be wasted. If you have small sector sizes, you can have smaller files (or smaller incremental changes in file size as files grow). However, because the disk is a mechanical device, there has to be a gap between sectors, and each sector needs housekeeping bits for synchronization, addresses, error correcting codes, etc.
Small sectors are inefficient because the relative space lost due to housekeeping increases as sector size is reduced.
The sector size was 512 bytes (dating back to 1956). Today, the 4 KB sector (introduced in 2009) is
increasingly being used by modern disks. By 2011 the majority of new drives had 4 KB sectors.
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