Logical block addressing

<p>Logical block addressing (LBA) is a common scheme used for specifying the location of <a href="/facts/Block_(data_storage)/S3vT7c6N">blocks of data</a> stored on <a href="/facts/Computer_storage/wPHKFpdx">computer storage</a> devices, generally <a href="/facts/Secondary_storage/wPHKFpdx">secondary storage</a> systems such as <a href="/facts/Hard_disk_drive/kekLSGSE">hard disk drives</a>.  LBA is a particularly simple <a href="/facts/Linear_addressing/6JIUgugY">linear addressing</a> scheme; blocks are located by an integer index, with the first block being LBA 0, the second LBA 1, and so on.
</p><p>The <a href="/facts/Parallel_ATA/QPchqXH8">IDE</a> standard included 22-bit LBA as an option, which was further extended to 28-bit with the release of ATA-1 (1994) and to 48-bit with the release of ATA-6 (2003), whereas the size of entries in on-disk and in-memory data structures holding the address is typically 32 or 64 bits. Most hard disk drives released after 1996 implement logical block addressing.
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Logical block addressing open-in-new

Logical block addressing