This glossary defines some terms used on this site or in ZAR manual. It is intended
to clarify some terms that may be ambigous, rather than to be a complete data
recovery reference.Please note the following Windows version naming
convention:
- Windows NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 2003 and later versions are collectively
referred to as "Windows NT".
- Windows 95, 95 OSR2, 98, 98 SE, and ME are collectively referred to as
"Windows 9x".
Basic Disk -
Block (Data Block) - a contigous array of
one or more sectors on disk.Boot Sector (Boot Record) -
Boot Volume - in Windows NT terms, this is a volume where the %SystemRoot%
directory (like C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINNT) resides. See also "System Volume".
Cluster - The allocation unit used by the filesystem (the "quantum" of
data read from or written to the filesystem, similar to sector on the disk).
Each file on the filesystem occupies zero or an integral number of clusters
(with a few exceptions). Cluster size is an integer multiple of the sector size.
Disk (or
Drive, Physical Disk,
Physical
Drive) - physical device used to store data, typical example being an
"IBM/Hitachi Deskstar hard drive". Other media types like Iomega ZIP disks,
flash memory cards, flash USB drives and so on are also referred to as "disks"
for the sake of simplicity. The same term can sometimes be applied to RAID
arrays as a whole (like this: Array #1 on a Promise controller) and to the
individual drives in RAID array.Dynamic Disk -
JBOD - short for "Just a Bunch Of Disks", see RAID.
LDM (Logical Disk Manager) and LDM Database -
MBR (Master Boot Record, also called Partition Table) -
Member Disk - a disk which is a part of Spanned/RAID volume. For more
details, see RAID 101.
PSU - short for "Power Supply Unit".
RAID (RAID array) - A way of storing data on several disks
(referred to as "disk/drive array"). There are several types of RAID arrays
(sometimes called "RAID Levels"), including RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, JBOD/Span
and so on. For more details, see RAID 101.
Sector - a 512-byte block of data on a physical disk. This is
a smallest amount of data the disk can address (something like a "quantum" of
data in modern hard drive industry).SOP - short for
"Standard Operating Procedure".
System Volume - in
Windows NT terms, this is the volume where BOOT.INI file resides. This may be
the same as the "Boot volume", but may be a different volume.
Volume (sometimes referred to as Partition) -
part of the disk that is referred to using a drive letter (or a mount point in
Windows 2000 or later). Drive C: of your computer presents a typical example of
a volume.
