Types of Storage

Types of Storage:

• Block Storage: any data (like files or DBs) are divided into equal sized blocks. This is good optimized fast read speed.
  • DBs, VM file systems, high read and write loads.
• Object Storage: unstructured format called objects, each object is tagged with an id that contains metadata about the underlying content.
  • text, videos, imgs...
• File Storage: stores data in hierarchical structure of files and folders. in networks a NAS (hardware) is often used alongside NFS and SMB to allows users to access network storage data in similar ways to a local hard drive
• Instance Storage: temporary block-level storage for your instance
  • good for temp data that changes often; buffers, cache, scratch data...
• backup
• hybrid / data transfer

Block vs file
block is good for fast read, unlike file storage which has the overhead / extra layer of a file system (NFS and SMB) to process before accessing the data.

A regular computer uses both types of storages. The physical drive (SSD) uses block storage, but you as a user don't interact with blocks directly, The OS puts a file system (NFTS, APFS, ext4) on top of that block storage.
The file system takes those blocks and organizes them into files and folders and adds metadata like names, sizes and permissions.

Finder and File Explorer are file manager programs GUIs

File System is the software rulebook, it's like an index or map that tells the OS how to translate a file into raw blocks on the drive.
Drives store it's partition table at the beginning of the drive and each partition could use different file systems inside it's boundaries.
When your format a drive you clear the index, writes the structure of the new file system (NTFS, exFAT..) onto the block storage and creates root dir.