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Secondary storage mediums are always divided into sectors, but if a file is placed on a secondary storage medium, most likely, part of the file will partially fill up a sector and another file will not be able to store itself in that partially filled up sector. Hence if secondary storage mediums are divided into sectors, then less data can be stored versus if the secondary storage medium was not divided into sectors. Then what is the philosophy of the sector system?

Does this philosophy carry over in terms of primary storage and how they are allocated into blocks of 8 bits?

Birds With Feathers
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Then what is the philosophy of the sector system?

It takes space to store the freelist of a filesystem. If blocks were a byte in size then it would take 11% of the space on the medium to store the freelist. There are very few, if any, situations where this much guaranteed usage would be useful.

Additionally, the use of blocks allows addressing of the medium to use fewer bits. 1 TiB requires 41 bits to address at the byte level, but only 29 bits with a 4kiB block size.

Does this philosophy carry over in terms of primary storage and how they are allocated into blocks of 8 bits?

Primary storage is divided into pages, with the size of a page dependent on both the system architecture and the operating system in use.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
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