Linux Administration Cookbook

How it works...

Physically, you have a disk.

This disk can be a hard disk drive (the old-school spinning platter type) or a solid state drive of some sort, be it NVMe on an M.2 connector or generic SATA.

Whatever the type of disk, you want to use it for storage.

To store data on the disk, it needs to have some things. First, it needs to be readable by the OS; this bit is handled by the kernel. If the kernel determines the disk to be an IDE drive (uncommon), it'll probably show as an hda device.

If the disk is SATA or SCSI, it might show up as an sda device. If it's a virtio virtual disk, and shows as such to the virtual machine, it will be listed as vda.

The disk lettering is sequential, which is why our three disks show up as sda, sdb, and ...