Volume system formats

A volume (or logical drive) is a single continuous accessible storage area, typically containing a file system. A volume system is used to manage the storage of one or more volumes.

A partition is a part of (typically) storage media. A partition is different conceptually, but its usage is comparable to a volume.

This documentation uses the term volume systems in a broad sense to describe a format that contains other volumes, e.g.

• encrypted volumes, such as BDE and LUKS;
• logical volume managers, such as Linux LVM;
• partitioning schemes, such as APM, GPT and MBR;
• and volume snapshots, such as volsnap.

Formats

• Apple Partition Map (APM)
• BitLocker Drive Encryption (BDE)
• BSD disklabel
• Core Storage (CS)
• GUID Partition Table (GPT)
• Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM)
• Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) Disk Encryption
• Master Boot Record (MBR)
• SGI disklabel (sgilabel)
• Volume Shadow Snapshot (volsnap)

Also see: hybrid volume and file system formats