Storage drives

Each Ceph cluster comprises a large number of individual storage drives that house both Ceph's internal metadata and the bulk data entrusted to us by users. By habit, many resources refer to these as disks, an artifact of the times when SSDs were not capacious or affordable, and even before they existed. Throughout this book we use the more expansive term drives to include other technologies. In practice and out in the community you will encounter the terms used interchangeably, though imprecisely.