At the bottom of the storage hierarchy are physical drives. These are units of physical storage, access to which is governed by a single disk controller. Your SSD or hard drive is a physical drive.\u00b9<\/p>\n
The next layer up is the volume. A volume is region of storage that is managed by a single file system. The relationship between volumes and physical drives is typically one-to-one, but it doesn’t have to be.<\/p>\n
For example, a physical drive might not have any volume associated with it at all. For example, it could be a raw hard drive that hasn’t been partitioned or formatted yet.<\/p>\n
You might take your physical drive and create multiple partitions, and then format each partition separately. Each of those formatted partitions is its own volume.<\/p>\n
Or you might get really fancy and use a feature like spanned volumes or Storage Spaces to take multiple physical drives and combine them into one giant volume.<\/p>\n
Once you have your volumes, you need to make them accessible somehow.\u00b2<\/p>\n
Mount points are places that volumes are inserted into the namespace and become paths. The most usual place to see them is as a drive letter. For example, your system boot volume is almost certainly mounted as Volumes don’t have to be mounted as drive letters, though. You can also mount them inside a subdirectory of an existing volume, sort of like grafting one tree onto another. One way to do this is by going to the Disk Management tool, right-clicking a volume, and selecting Change drive letter and paths<\/i>. From there, you can add a path for a volume, and the contents of the volume will be visible via that path.<\/p>\n Note that a volume can be mounted in multiple places, or it might not be mounted at all.<\/p>\n Next time, we’ll look at how to navigate these concepts in code.<\/p>\n \u00b9 Paradoxically, you can have virtual physical drives, like a RAM drive.<\/p>\n \u00b2 Theoretically, you could eschew mounting the volume and just access it via its volume GUID.<\/p>\n I mean, theoretically you could do that, but you’d also be a little bit crazy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Navigating the storage topology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-104380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-code"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":" Navigating the storage topology.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}C:<\/code>.<\/p>\nC:\\>type \\\\?\\Volume{8c3513a4-d064-4c99-81fc-66e20810ec3c}\\windows\\win.ini\r\n; for 16-bit app support\r\n[fonts]\r\n[extensions]\r\n[mci extensions]\r\n[files]\r\n[Mail]\r\nMAPI=1\r\n<\/pre>\n