File storage, Block storage and Object storage

                                  














Found the above amazing and absolutely concise diagram in the internet!    

Here is reference to my understanding of file, block and object storage.

 

FILE STORAGE

• Data is managed in terms of a hierarchical structure
• In the above figure, root directory contains dir1 and dir1 contains file1 which explains the concept of hierarchial structure. 
  
• This basically shows how the data is organised or contained in a file storage.
• File storage is most commonly used type of storage for organizing the data in operating systems.

BLOCK STORAGE

• Data is managed in terms of blocks.
• Each block is nothing but a sequence of bytes or bits (or chunk of physical memory). 
• Α block can be considered analogous to normal disk, which can be formatted with a filesystem. Then files can be stored on it.
• Block storage is used when direct and high performance access to storage is required like for virtualization and Databases. 

OBJECT STORAGE

• Data is managed in terms of objects. i.e, data is stored as objects
• Each object typically includes the data itself, a variable amount of metadata, and a globally unique identifier.
• This unique identifier is a key or URL, which allows easy retrieval of the object whenever required.
• Object storage is generally used to store a large amount of unstructured data like images, videos, audio files, backups etc (This highlights the scalability feature of the object storage, refer first diagram