disk partition (disk slice)

disk partition (disk slice)

Part of a disk, typically configured by the system administrator through an OS level utility such as the format utility on the Solaris operating system. A disk partition can encapsulate whole or part of the space present in the disk. A given disk can be configured into multiple partitions and used by higher layer entities in the storage stack.

On UNIX systems, a disk partition can be accessed through the device driver available on the operating system. Available device drivers include: character device, block device, and pseudo device.