User:Zulu Foxtrott/GentooOnARM/EasyInstall/BlockDevices

Block devices
Let's take a good look at disk-oriented aspects of Gentoo Linux and Linux in general, including block devices, partitions, and Linux filesystems. Once the ins and outs of disks are understood, partitions and filesystems can be established for installation.

To begin, let's look at block devices. SCSI and Serial ATA drives are both labeled under device handles such as:, , {{Path|/dev/sdc}, etc. On more modern machines, PCI Express based NVMe solid state disks have device handles such as , , etc., while on embedded systems, SD cards and MMCs have handles such as , , etc.

The following table will help readers determine where to find a certain type of block device on the system:

The block devices above represent an abstract interface to the disk. User programs can use these block devices to interact with the disk without worrying about whether the drives are SATA, SCSI, or something else. The program can simply address the storage on the disk as a bunch of contiguous, randomly-accessible 4096-byte (4K) blocks.