Unix & Linux: Differences between volume, partition and drive (6 Solutions!!)

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Unix & Linux: Differences between volume, partition and drive

The Question: What do these terms mean exactly?
1. partition
2. volume
3. drive
On Windows, one may say drive C: or partition C:. On Linux I’m not sure what
should be used for partitions because they don’t have a name.

Solutions: Please watch the whole video to see all solutions, in order of how many people found them helpful

== This solution helped 1 person ==
Well, in Linux also partitions do have a name. Suppose you have a HDD, it’ll be
called sdX (X being a,b and so on depending upon drive numbers) and in turn
partitions will be named as sda1, sda2 and so on.
You can look them up in /dev, it’ll show all device files of your system.

== This solution helped 63 people ==
The term drive refers to a 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.
Storage devices are labeled under /dev according to the type of device followed
by a letter signifying the order in which they were detected by the system. In
Linux prior to kernel version 2.6.20 the prefix hd signified an IDE device, so
for instance the device files /dev/hda, /dev/hdb and /dev/hdc corresponded to
the first, second and third IDE device respectively. The prefix sd was
originally used for SCSI devices, but is now used for all https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA and SATA devices, including devices on a IDE
bus. If there are more than 26 such devices in the system, devices from the
27th onwards are labeled /dev/sdAa, /dev/sdAb and so on.
A physical storage device can be divided into multiple logical storage units
known as partitions. Each partition will show up under /dev as a separate
device node. A number after the device letter signifies the number of the
partion, so for example the device node files /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 refer to
the first and second partition of the first PATA device. Note that on PCs using
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record, due to the limit of four
primary_paritions and the way extended partitions are handled the partition
numbering can slightly differ from the actual partition count.
Other Unix-like systems may refer to disks and partitions in other ways. For
example, FreeBSD_uses_/dev/adaX (where X is one or more digits) to refer to
PATA disks and /dev/adaXpY (where X and Y are both one or more digits) to refer
to partitions on PATA disks.
The term volume in Linux is related to the Logical Volume Manager (https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Volume_Manager_%28Linux%29), 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.

== This solution helped 12 people ==
1. A drive is a physical block disk. For example: /dev/sda.
2. A partition A drive can be divided into some logic block disk. These
logic block disk are named partition. For example: /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2.
3. A volume is also a logic block disk. Volume is a concept involved with
partition. A volume can contain many partition. You can take a look at
LVM project to understand the concept of a volume. http://sourceware.org/
lvm2/.
For example: vg0/lvol0

== This solution helped 1 person ==
A single volume can be composed of several drives. This is the case when you
have a Raid 0 configuration. All of the drives = a single volume.

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