Logical Block Addressing

Logical block addressing (LBA) is a common scheme used for specifying the location of blocks of data stored on computer storage devices, generally secondary storage systems such as hard disk drives. LBA is a particularly simple linear addressing scheme; blocks are located by an integer index, with the first block being LBA 0, the second LBA 1, and so on.

The IDE 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.

In logical block addressing, only one number is used to address data, and each linear base address describes a single block.

The LBA scheme replaces earlier schemes which exposed the physical details of the storage device to the software of the operating system. Chief among these was the cylinder-head-sector (CHS) scheme, where blocks were addressed by means of a tuple which defined the cylinder, head, and sector at which they appeared on the hard disk. CHS did not map well to devices other than hard disks (such as tapes and networked storage), and was generally not used for them. CHS was used in early MFM and RLL drives, and both it and its successor, extended cylinder-head-sector (ECHS), were used in the first ATA drives. However, current disk drives use zone bit recording, where the number of sectors per track depends on the track number. Even though the disk drive will report some CHS values as sectors per track (SPT) and heads per cylinder (HPC), they have little to do with the disk drive's true geometry.

LBA was first introduced in SCSI as an abstraction. While the drive controller still addresses data blocks by their CHS address, this information is generally not used by the SCSI device driver, the OS, filesystem code, or any applications (such as databases) that access the "raw" disk. System calls requiring block-level I/O pass LBA definitions to the storage device driver; for simple cases (where one volume maps to one physical drive), this LBA is then passed directly to the drive controller.

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