In Sun Microsystems' Solaris computer operating system, disk partitions are sometimes known as slices. This is a conceptual reference to the slicing of a cake into several pieces. A slice is composed of a contiguous range of blocks on a disk.
The term "slice" is also used in the FreeBSD operating system to refer to PC BIOS hard disk partitions, to avoid confusion with FreeBSD's own disklabel-based partitioning scheme.