Quick cheat sheet:
- Physical disk, represented by Win32_DiskDrive and MSFT_Disk WMI classes. This is hardware presented to your computer. It is HDD, SSD, FC LUN or iSCSI LUN.
- Partition, represented by Win32_DiskPartition and MSFT_Partition WMI classes. Partitions are walls that transforming your physical space into rooms, which later can be used to store your data. Physical disk can have 0 or more partitions.
- Volume, represented by Win32_Volume and MSFT_Volume WMI classes. Volumes are named spaces, from abstract rooms you get living room, kitchen and bedrooms. You format room to make it “named room”. Or in other words, you format partition to some file system, i.e. NTFS, FAT or ReFS. Volumes can store data and provide access to it. One partition can have 0 or 1 volume. When partition has 0 volume, in most cases this means that there is no data accessible by user.
- Logical Disks, represented by Win32_LogicalDisk. Logical disks are like doors to your named rooms. Without doors you can access your named rooms through windows (mount points) and ventilation (“start \?\Volume{GUID}” command), and of course it is not always convenient. So giving your volumes disk letter makes it Logical Disks. One volume equal to 0 or 1 logical disks.