Final answer:
To calculate the number of disk blocks needed for the bit vector of a 2 TB disk, you must convert the disk's capacity into bits and then divide by the number of bits each block can represent. For a 2 TB disk and 512-byte blocks, 4,294,967,296 blocks are needed.
Step-by-step explanation:
To calculate the number of disk blocks needed to store the bit vector for a 2 TB disk where each block is 512 bytes (which is equal to 4096 bits, since there are 8 bits in a byte), we start by converting the total storage to bits. One terabyte (TB) is 1024 gigabytes (GB), one GB is 1024 megabytes (MB), one MB is 1024 kilobytes (KB), and each KB is 1024 bytes.
To find the total number of bits that represent the storage capacity, we multiply:
2 TB * 1024 GB/TB * 1024 MB/GB * 1024 KB/MB * 1024 bytes/KB * 8 bits/byte = 17,592,186,044,416 bits
Next, we need to determine how many disk blocks are required to represent each bit of space:
17,592,186,044,416 bits / 4096 bits/block = 4,294,967,296 blocks
Therefore, 4,294,967,296 blocks are needed to store the bit vector for a 2 TB disk when each disk block is 512 bytes long.