Let's talk about GPT and MBR partitions.
It all started in 1981 with the PC specification.
We needed something to boot the computer,
and that became the master boot record.
And this master boot record has a size of 512 bytes.
It's very small, and it was needed in 1981
because disks were very small.
Of this 512 bytes, there was boot information, but also
64 bytes to store partitions.
And in these 64 bytes, with 16 bytes for each partition,
you could create four partitions up to a maximum size
of 2 tebibytes.
If you wanted to use more partitions,
extended and logical partitions should be created.
On modern systems, there is no need to use MBR anymore,
and that is because the Grid Partition Table, or GPT,
was introduced in 2010 to overcome MBR limitations.
What is the result?
Well, there's more space to store partitions, 32 sectors
instead of 64 bytes.
As discussed before, 16 kibibytes in total,
which allows to address 128 partitions maximum,
and that addresses disks that are bigger than 2 tebibytes.
8 zebibytes, to be precise, and that is approximately 9
billion kibibytes, so quite a lot.
In this course, we are only going
to cover GPT because MBR is old and really something
that you shouldn't use anymore.