What is the most basic unit of access to disk storage?

Bit. In the binary number system, each 0 or 1 is a bit, and a bit is the smallest unit of memory.

Byte byte: The 8-bit binary that can represent common English characters is usually referred to as a byte.

An English letter (regardless of case and case) occupies one byte of space, and a Chinese character of Chinese occupies two bytes of space

Symbols: English punctuation 2 occupies one byte, Chinese punctuation occupies two bytes

A binary sequence of digits, as a unit of numbers in a computer, is generally an 8-bit binary number, such as an ASCII code is a byte, and the conversion of such units is:

1 kilobyte (kgb) = 1024 gigabytes.

1 gigabyte (GB) = 1024 megabytes.

1 megabyte (MB) = 1024 kilobytes.

1 kilobyte (KB) = 1024 bytes.

1 byte = 8 bits

According to the question you gave, the answer should be bytes.

If you look at the definition of the lower bits, each 0 or 1 is a bit, but it can't be stored inside. The minimum unit of information storage should be bytes.

Cluster. The sector is the leader of the cluster.

Inside a computer, information is stored, calculated, processed, and transmitted in binary form. There are several types of information storage units, such as bits, bytes, and words. There are several storage capacity units of various storage devices, such as KB, MB, GB, and TB.

1. Basic storage unit.

Bit: A number of binary numbers, which can be 0 or 1, and is the smallest unit of data in a computer.

byte (b): The basic unit of data in a computer, which consists of a byte for every 8 bits. All kinds of information need at least one byte to store and process in a computer. For example, an ASCII code is represented by one byte, and a Chinese character is represented by two bytes.

Word: Two bytes are called a word. The storage unit of Chinese characters is a single character.

2. Expanded storage units.

In the storage capacity representation of various storage media (such as memory, hard disks, optical discs, etc.) of computers, the storage units that users are exposed to are not bits, bytes, and words, but kb, mb, gb, etc., but this is not a new storage unit, but is based on byte conversion.

kb：1kb=1024b。In the early days, floppy disks were 360kb and 720kb, but floppy disks are rarely used anymore.

mb：1mb=1024kb。In the early days, microcomputers had 128MB, 256MB, and 512MB of memory, and now the memory is 1GB, 2GB, or even larger.

gb：1gb=1024mb。In the early days, microcomputers had 60GB and 80GB hard drives, and now they are all 500GB, 1TB or even larger.

tb：1tb=1024gb。At present, the storage capacity of personal microcomputers can also reach this level, and as a server or specialized computer, such a large storage capacity is indispensable.

From the point of view of the application, including the user interface, the smallest unit of access information is bytes;

From the physical structure of the disk, the smallest unit of access information is a sector, and a sector is 512 bytes;

From the perspective of the access management of the hard disk by the operating system, the smallest unit of access information is a cluster, a cluster is a logical concept, and a cluster can be or 64 consecutive sectors. A cluster can only be occupied by one file, even if it is a file with only one byte, it will occupy a cluster when stored on disk, and the remaining sectors in this cluster are useless.

For example, when formatting with the NTFS file system, the default is that 8 sectors form a cluster, that is, 4096 bytes. So if you save a file that is only 1 byte (e.g. the letter n), it will actually take up 4096 bytes (4k) on disk, so a "cluster" can also be understood as the smallest unit of information that the operating system can access.

The minimum access unit for a file is 4 KB, and the minimum access unit for a database is one to more than one file.

From a physical point of view, the basic unit is a sector (a sector is 512 bytes), so from an application perspective, it is correct to say that the basic unit is a byte.