During a ransomware investigation at a law firm in San Francisco, forensic analysts examine encrypted...

The correct answer is C because a sector is the fundamental addressable storage unit on a disk and has traditionally been 512 bytes on many storage devices. Clusters are built from one or more sectors, and files are then stored using clusters according to the file system’s allocation logic. This makes the sector the lowest-level base unit described in the question. The CHFI v11 blueprint covers logical structure of disks, storage concepts, and evidence characteristics, so candidates are expected to understand how disks are organized from physical or logical base units upward. A cluster is not the smallest component here because it is made up of sectors. A partition is a larger logical division of the disk, and a file system is the structure that manages files, metadata, and allocation within a partition or volume. In forensic examination, distinguishing these layers is important when interpreting carving results, file-system metadata, slack space, and allocation behavior. Although your pasted options looked incomplete, the description clearly matches sector as the correct storage component.