What is the difference between a hard drive and a hard disk ?

[tmfk]

I am running Mint 21.1 with Mate desktop. I have four hard disk drives for storage connected to the four motherboard sata ports. I am running the OS from a 32 GB USB 3.0 flash drive. I have taken ownership and reformatted each disk with one partition and btrfs file system. My issue is that even though 2 of my disks are exactly alike (both are WD Black 1 TB Hard drives), only one of them shows up on the desktop with an icon that looks like an "eject" symbol, The other one has an icon in Caja that looks more like a traditional hard disk. In the Disks application, one of them is referred to as a drive and the other is referred to as a hard disk. Why the difference in terminology and why the different icons?
This feels like a newbie question but if I posted in the wrong place let me know and I will use a different forum. many thanks in advance to anyone with insight on this.

Edit: I changed the question slightly. The "hard disk" DOES show up on the desktop when mounted. However, it uses a different icon still, both on the desktop and in Caja.

[MiZoG]

Some details perhaps other than the identical filesystems make the difference. Mount options (fstab)? Labels?

[Cosmo.]

Would be interesting to see a screenshot (or 2) of Disks).

[kato181]

Hard Disk Drives, and Hard Drives are one of the same. They were called that because they were mechanical drives, that is powered by a drive mechanism. Today most drives are SSD (Solid State Drives), they are not mechanically driven.

[tmfk]

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Would be interesting to see a screenshot (or 2) of Disks).

I have the disks screenshots and fstab . I'll be glad to include any other relevant output or screenshots if you can figure this out for me.

Additionally, these disks all have a single partition but I see no easy way to repartition them with, for example, multiple partitons. I am considering trying to move the OS from a flash thumb drive to the seagate 1TB drive but I don't want to use up the whole disk, just 50 GB or so. When i tried to add an efi partition and system partition, there seemed no way to do that with Disks so I installed gparted. Gparted was still quite problematic. I ended up not saving the changes because it didn't seem to be working like I expected. I originally had these set up for an openmedia vault installation but I couldn't get my wifi to work with that so I deleted everything on the disks before I switched to Mint 21.1 Mate. Outside of a file permission issue where root was the owner, which I fixed I think, I haven't had problems with permissions. I even have a samba share working which is accessible from another Mint laptop and from Windows 11, and only to my user account with passwd.

[tmfk]

Hard Disk Drives, and Hard Drives are one of the same. They were called that because they were mechanical drives, that is powered by a drive mechanism. Today most drives are SSD (Solid State Drives), they are not mechanically driven.

I would agree with you, however, I was referring to the terminology used by the Disks application on my Mate desktop. It is calling one hard disk a "Hard disk" and another one a "Drive" and its using different icons for them. It even is slightly different in the info it gives for the disk as it includes temp and condition.

[tmfk]

Some details perhaps other than the identical filesystems make the difference. Mount options (fstab)? Labels?

Any idea which details I could edit to make them look the same? It seems the system feels they are somehow different but they all are btrfs and the fstab entries are identical except for the block device letters (sda vs sdc)

[Cosmo.]

When i tried to add an efi partition and system partition, there seemed no way to do that with Disks

If the drive is completely filled with the existing partition you can of course not add anything, as long as you did not reduce the size of the existing partition. I have no experience with btrfs, so I do not know, which specialties can give problems. Just out of curiosity: What is the partition table for those drives?

[AndyMH]

Your screenshot in disks - the top drive will be your system drive, so that is why it is shown differently, you cannot eject it. Unless you have changed the mount points, the partitions on the other drives will be mounting in /media/you, that is why they are shown as removable.

[tmfk]

Your screenshot in disks - the top drive will be your system drive, so that is why it is shown differently, you cannot eject it. Unless you have changed the mount points, the partitions on the other drives will be mounting in /media/you, that is why they are shown as removable.

Hi Andy,
The top drive is a storage disk. The system drive is the 32GB PNY drive, as I stated in the original post. I still haven't figured out why it put the different icons or adds the drive condition for one but not the others. I have since edited the fstab to only mount the 4TB drive . Then I erased the partitions on the 2 WD drives and set them up as GPT and then created a volume group and a logical volume. I then added an entry into fstab to mount the logical volume. Everythings works fine and I'm following Altair's tutorial on samba sharing. The physical disks though are still represented differently and it's driving me nuts trying to figure out why. Perhaps I don't need to know, but it must be because there is something different between the set up of those two disks. I even checked the line where you can specify what icon to use on the desktop but they are both blank.

Edit: Yes the mount points are changed to mnt/XXXX. I did this as I thought I read it would make the sharing configuration easier. Not sure it has anything to do with the icon that Disks is displaying though.

[AndyMH]

Short answer is I don't know. Don't use mate. Used to think that if a partition was mounted in /mnt it would show as fixed and in /media as removable but not convinced that is true. Might be something to do with using btrfs. I don't use disks much (prefer gparted), but in disks both my drives are showing the same icon - same as the icon for the top drive in your screenshot.

Should have read your earlier post more thoroughly, booting from a stick. Obvious question, with so many HDDs why boot from a stick?