Glossary of terms
Cluster A group of sectors, and normally smallest amount of space a file can use, ie a 1 byte file will always take up 1 cluster of space on the hard drive.
Endian Little and Big endian define how a computer stores its numbers. Any number over 255 requires more than one byte to store, and little and big endian refer to the sequence. Little endian stores the lowest byte first, and big endian stores the highest byte first. So if we want to store the value 266, this is 10AH. In Little endian it would be stored 0A 01 and Big endian, it would be store 01 0A
Little endian is also known as Intel byte ordering, and Big Endian as Motorola byte ordering. It could also be PC and MAC)
FAT File allocation table - used on DOS/Windows systems to track which sectors have been written to
FAT12 12 bits per cluster, max 4096 clusters
FAT16 16 bits per cluster, max 65536 clusters
FAT32 32 bits per cluster, max 4G clusters
GUID Globally Universal ID
MFT Master File Table, file descriptions in NTFS. A two sector record that always starts with the text FILE
MD5 16 byte hash value
SHA-1 20 byte hash value
Slack Space at the end of a file, but contained within a cluster that has been used
Unallocated space Complete clusters that are not used by current files