Why do partitions start at sector 2048

Question

I was using fdisk and was wondering why partitions start at sector 2048 instead of 1

In: 1

Answer 1

Partitions on a hard drive typically start at sector 2048 instead of sector 0 for a few reasons. One reason is that the first few sectors of a hard drive are reserved for the Master Boot Record (MBR), which contains information about the partitions on the drive. By starting partitions at sector 2048, there is enough space for the MBR and any additional boot code that may be needed. Additionally, starting partitions at sector 2048 aligns them on a 2048-sector (1MB) boundary, which can improve performance when reading and writing large files. This is because most hard drives have internal physical block sizes of 4KB or 8KB, so starting partitions on a 2048-sector boundary allows them to be aligned with the physical block size of the drive.