Technology

I know the filesystem is simple to Linux users, but the semantic form of physical drives getting a letter always made more sense to me.

That's one of the things that semi-experienced Windows users need to wrap their head around, but I strongly disagree that drive letters are somehow inferior to a hierarchical file system structure. I mean, the A:, B:, C: ... convention was originally just intended for the first IBM PC with 1 or 2 floppy drives. It was never intended to support complex storage configurations, whereas the hierarchical file system was designed for Unix systems that had to handle multiple magnetic drives from the start. It is a much more flexible system to organize your file storage.

On Linux, as best I understand it, if I have three drives, two of them are at /dev/hdd0 and hdd1. But they’re not actually there.

That's because there is a difference between a block device and a mounted file system. Windows just obscures that difference from you with its archaic drive mapping system.

All your block devices and partitions on your block devices will be in /dev with a meaningful name. You can list them with the lsblk command. If a partition contains a file system that Linux knows how to use, you can mount it anywhere you like.

they’re accessed at /media/hdd0 after mounting them

No that's not "convention" at all. Some desktop environments may decide to mount undefined drives there, but there really is no convention, ultimately you mount it where you want it to be mounted.

If you place an item in /home/documents/notporn, then who knows which drive it’s on because you don’t know what symlinks someone set up to make that folder.

If your unsure, df /home/documents/notporn should tell you exactly what drive it's on, but ultimately it's up to you to know how you've organized your storage.

BTW I've said this before, but Linux is probably harder for users who know Windows just well enough to be dangerous than it is for relative beginners, because there are so many concepts and things they take for granted that they have to unlearn.

So just to help a little bit without getting too technical...

df -h is your friend to find out which physical drive or partition relates to which directory (called the "mount point")

If you want, you can set up each drive/partition to be mounted a bit Windows-esque.

For example:

• Drive 1, partition 1 will almost certainly be root /
• But drive 1, partition 2 can be mounted to: /mnt/d/
• And then drive 1, partition 3 can be mounted to: /mnt/e/

And so on.

You'll need to look up fstab to understand how to do that.

I understand it's tricky to get your head around initially as I felt exactly the same coming from Windows to Linux.

Once you get your head around partitions being able to be mounted anywhere, it actually becomes really handy

I'd amend that to say I wouldn't count "regedit" or group policy muck to be "easy" by virtue of having "a gui". Those are areas where technically there's GUI that might be CLI-only under Linux, but hardly friendly enough to make a difference.

It's not on mine yet.

So some a/b testing maybe