Sector

A logical segment of information on a particular track. The smallest addressable unit of storage on a disk. Tracks are divided into sectors, each sector is 512 bytes long. They contain data, but also contain "housekeeping" information. Modern drives use ZDR - Zone Density Recording, where there are more sectors per track on the outside of the disk where there is more surface area, and fewer and fewer sectors as you go in toward the center of the drive. Newer drives have about 16 zones now. This allows more data to fit on the drive. The outer zones therefore have a higher data transfer rate that those closer to the center of the drive.

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