Drives, images, and virtual disks: A guide to storage terms & concepts

The article explains various storage-related terms and concepts. A hard drive refers to the physical storage medium, which can be either a traditional HDD with rotating magnetic discs or a modern SSD with flash memory. The term "drive" encompasses the electronics and technology that handle reading and writing on these storage devices. Partitions are logical subdivisions of a data carrier, while volumes are partitions that have been formatted and assigned a file system, making them usable by the operating system. A single hard drive can contain multiple partitions and volumes. Virtual hard disks are files that behave like real data carriers, and virtual partitions are possible by combining multiple physical storage areas into one logical unit, often used in Linux. Images are complete copies of a volume, including data, file systems, and boot information, used for backup and restoration purposes. macOS uses containers with the APFS file system, which hold multiple volumes that dynamically share storage space, providing more flexibility than classic partitions with fixed sizes.