Noun
the part of a floppy disk or hard disk where information is stored about the location of each piece of information on the disk (and about the location of unusable areas of the disk)
Source: WordNetExamples of data structures stored on disk to retrieve files include the File Allocation Table (FAT) in the DOS file system and inodes in many UNIX file systems, as well as other operating system data structures (also known as metadata ). Source: Internet
It is loosely based on the File Allocation Table architecture, but incompatible, proprietary and protected by patents. Source: Internet