Final answer:
A general name for the physical areas on a hard drive is sectors. These are subdivisions on a track of the disk that store user data, usually in amounts of 512 bytes.
Step-by-step explanation:
The term that describes a general name for physical areas on a hard drive is sectors. Sectors are subdivisions of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. Each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, typically 512 bytes for hard drives. They are one of the smallest units of storage on a disk that can be written to or read from.
Other terms like clusters, tracks, and volumes have different meanings. A cluster is a group of sectors that the operating system can address as a single unit, a track is a concentric circle on the surface of the disk, and a volume is a logical partition of the storage space, which might contain several tracks and sectors.