Drives, Volumes, Disks & Partitions

October 18, 2019

Software

Tech, Storage

Drives, Volumes, Disks & Partitions #

Drive #

Physical storage device such as a hard disk, solid-state disk, removable USB flash drive etc. In Unix-like operating systems devices are represented by special file system objects called device nodes which are visible under the /dev directory

Partions #

A physical storage device can be divided into multiple logical storage units known as partitions.

Volume #

The term volume in Linux is related to the Logical Volume Manager (LVM), which can be used to manage mass storage devices. A physical volume is a storage device or partition. A logical volume created by the LVM is a logical storage device which can span multiple physical volumes.

Volume implies formatting while a partition does not

On Linux #

/dev/sda1

`sd` SCSI device
`a`	 First drive detected by the OS
`1`	 First partition

Mount #

Mount provides the filesystem on some device to be accessible at some path on a unix system. It places the root of the filesytem of the device at the specified path mount -t type device dir

here,

type is the device’s type
dir is the path to make the files available at

findmnt can be used to list all the mounts

Mounts unlike symbolic links ln -s can be accessed with chroot operations

References