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Terminology

There are various ways to refer to different structures either on disk or presented to the user. These documuments adhere to the following naming convention:

Disk: A physical storage device.
Sector: The smallest unit of storage on a disk (assumed here to be 512 bytes).
Partition: A set of contiguous sectors on a disk.
Filesystem: A method of organising files on a disk, e.g. NTFS, FAT.
Container: A set of partitions. It controls the way filesystem information is written for the purposes of efficiency or fault tolerance.
Volume: This is the user's view. A place for storing data files, e.g. C:, E:.