| Table of Contents |
|---|
Technical background
Block device partitioning has a long history, related to the physical construction of hard disk drives – to their cylinders, heads and sectors. Current hard disk drives present themselves to the operating system as a simple sequence of blocks. For practical partitioning purposes the physical construction no longer matters except that Zone Bit Recording means that a partition at the beginning of the drive (physically the outer edge) transfers data faster than one at the end of the drive. With the introduction of 4k sector sizes, aligning partitions on sector boundaries has become important.
Wikipedia zone bit recording (ZBR a.k.a Zone Constant Angular Velocity (Zone CAV, Z-CAV or ZCAV))
Wikipedia advanced format (> 512 B sectors)
The EBR/EPBR
Each logical partition is preceded by an Extended Boot Record (EBR) a.k.a. Extended Partition Boot Record (EPBR) of one sector followed by a number of unused sectors. There are commonly 62 unused sectors which, with the EBR, fill a historical 63 sector track.
...