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A drive (be it HDD or SSD) is a block device, all drives are divided into blocks/sectors since they are a rather lossy medium. Data written to a bit may not necessarily be read accurately and so the solution is to have an Error-Correcting-Code that will allow to recover from some number of badly read bits (above that and you get a medium error from the drive). Since an ECC for a byte is a bit excessive the drives use blocks of 512 bytes or 4096 bytes, one reason for the move from 512 to 4096 is that the ECC becomes more efficient.

HDDs also have small "gaps" that have headers to locate the sectors (in the distant past you could do a low-level format to correct these gaps as well).

SSDs do not have these gaps but they do need the ECC.



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