3 ms·

It's pretty weird that Windows drives use random letters instead of just the name of the disk.

• kemotep 4y ago
  It’s a legacy from the IBM CP/CMS days. First floppy drive was A, Second B, and when internal Hard Drives came along they defaulted to C to be compatible with computers that had at least 2 disk drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment?wprov=...
  • YakBizzarro 4y ago
    If I rembember correctly, you could use the B drive even if you have just one unit. It was useful to copy files from one disk to another, even if you didn't had an hard drive as temporary storage
• layer8 4y ago
  This was ultimately inherited from IBM’s CMS system [0] (from 1968 I believe) via CP/M and DOS. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMS_file_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMS_file_system
• jeroenhd 4y ago
  I tend to use /dev/sda1 more than /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:17.0-ata-1.0-part1. Disk names are nice, but also often longer than 8 characters and usually not very unique. Starting from A and iterating on through Z makes sense, for an OS that's designed for two drives at most. /dev/sda and /dev/sdb are no less arbitrary than A: and B:. One major difference was that Unix was used on big servers and couldn't fit itself onto a single disk, so /usr had to be created. DOS and Windows never needed a second drive to boot, so they didn't need to embed their resources into the drive hierarchy. Of course, you can mount NTFS volumes at any directory you wish since at least somewhere in the early 2000s. Very few people do it, but you can! For example: $Disk = Get-Disk 2 $Partition = Get-Partition -DiskNumber $Disk.Number $Partition | Add-PartitionAccessPath -AccessPath "G:\Folder01"