- #Softraid vs disk pool software
- #Softraid vs disk pool windows
On Windows without Storage Spaces, volume is a collection of one or several partitions. Pool, volume, and dataset are often intertwined concepts, with different meanings in ZFS and Windows with and without Storage Spaces.
BTRFS and ZFS, when used with multiple disks, control disk layout, distribution of data across disks, fault tolerance, and error recovery. ReFS, when used on top of Windows Storage Spaces, peeks down into Storage Spaces pool layer for error recovery and to optimize disk space usage. Modern filesystems still perform all the functions outlined above, but additionally they are aware of their underlying media, and behave differently when placed on top of different configuration of physical drives, pools, or volumes. With RAIDs and flash-based media, where alignment requirements matter, steps to ensure proper aligment are usually taken at partition level, keeping filesystem isolated from the details.Įxamples of classical filesystems are FAT, NTFS, exFAT, XFS, and EXT-series filesystems. What additional features are available, ranging from symlinks to compression and deduplication.Ĭlassical filesystem is isolated from the details of its underlying storage it will store files the same way on a hard drive, on a RAID, or on a SD card. Various numerical limits: how many files can be on the filesystem, what is the maximum file size, how long can a file name be, and so on. How files and directories are stored and organized on the underlying media (disk, partition, volume, or even in a file). There are two common formats used to store partition information – MBR and GPT.Ĭlassical filesystem is a set of rules defining how files are stored. Some removable storage, like USB sticks and memory cards do not use partitions at all. There can be several partitions on one storage device, but partitions cannot span non-adjacent regions or multiple devices. Partition is a designated contiguous part of a single disk (or other storage device), defined by starting position and length. However, in data recovery situations, you should avoid this usage whenever possible, because you do not want to lose the distinction. SSDs, USB flash drives, and even SD/microSD memory cards are sometimes referred to as disks. Both disk and drive are often used to refer to things other than traditional platter-and-heads hard drive. 
With fixed disks, terms disk and drive are interchangeable. With removable media requiring specialized reader-writer device (like floppies or DVD-ROMs), drive refers to a reader-writer device, and disk refers to the media itself, as in there is no disk in drive. While there are different combinations of layers, disk is always on the lowest level (nearest to hardware), partitions (if present) are second lowest level, and filesystem is the top level (nearest to user).ĭisk in most cases refers to a single physical data storage device.ĭisks are also called drives (as in hard drive). The concepts of disks, partitions, pools, volumes, datasets, and filesystems are all used to define various layers of the storage systems. #Softraid vs disk pool software
Layering allows system builders to mix and match various physical hardware with various software architectures on top of it, thus producing desired balance between speed, capacity, redundancy, and functional requirements. However, the terminology is something of a mess, with different conventions used in Windows and Linux, and in different storage systems. In storage planning, or in data recovery, precise understanding is important. In everyday talk, there is no big harm in mixing and matching these terms to whatever meanings required. Today, I saw a question conflating disks, pools, volumes, and datasets in one sentence, so I decided that written-down definitions and explanations may be handy. Disks, Partitions, Pools, Volumes, Datasets, and Filesystems
0 kommentar(er)
