Access Rights to ASCII
Access rights - a set of rules determining a set of actions which user is allowed to do with filesystem objects. Typical actions are read, write, and execute. An "Access Denied" error is reported when the current access rights configuration does not allow the action as requested.
Active partition
Active partition - a partition which is marked as bootable.
Advanced format
Advanced format - data storage format on a hard drive. It uses 4 kilobytes per sector instead of typical 512 bytes and ECC area of 100 bytes in size instead of typical 50 bytes. Using advanced format increases disk space available for user. However, the discrepancy between 512 bytes per logical sector used in the operating system and 4KB physical on-disk storage introduces a set of issues referred to as "alignment problem".
Alignment - a process of moving partition and filesystem so that data clusters are aligned on the boundaries of physical blocks on the storage device. The alignment is significant in SSDs and advanced format hard drives. If the partition is not aligned, then for each cluster written onto the filesystem, two underlying physical blocks need to be updated, slowing down a rotational hard drive or increasing wear on an SSD.
APFS (Apple File System) - is a brand-new filesystem developed by Apple Inc and released in 2017 to be used on Apple computers. APFS filesystem came to replace HFS+ which has been used on Apple computers since 1998. Apple Inc. has developed APFS almost from scratch taking into account all that was missing in HFS+ such as 64-bit pointers, time measured in nanoseconds.
APM (Apple Partition Map) - a format of partition table used in Apple Macintosh.
ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) - a parallel interface between a controller and a storage device. Transferred commands are also a part of ATA interface. It is a predecessor of SATA. Sometimes ATA is called IDE.
ATAPI
ATAPI - see ATA.
Attribute - a property of an object (e.g. file). Attribute may be a binary value like "yes/no" which is then encoded by one bit. Some attributes are more complex, like creation and modification timestamps. NTFS filesystem even considers the file data to be the attribute of the file.
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) - an encoding scheme to represent decimal numbers, Latin and other alphabets, punctuation and control symbols. Unlike Unicode, ASCII does not allow for easy manipulation with non-English characters, because only up to 256 characters can be used simultaneously.