Illustrating the Layout of Physical Media

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford

In the first seven chapters of this book, we explored the organization of storage hierarchy in the Linux kernel, the organization of different layers, the different abstraction methods, and the representation of physical storage devices. We’re now done with explaining the software side of things in the storage stack, which means it’s time to take a look at the actual hardware and see what lies beneath. I thought it would be best if we got to look at the different types of storage media so that we could not only understand their operations but also see why the Linux kernel uses different schedulers and techniques to handle the different types of drives. In short, getting to know the internals of disk drives will make the information presented earlier in this book a lot more relevant.

The choice of a hardware medium...