Why Do Icons for Disks Differ From Icons for Logical Drives?

Key Definitions (Quick Primer)

• Hardware (physical) disk / device. The actual storage hardware you can hold in your hand: internal SSD/HDD, external USB drive, NVMe, SATA SSD, memory card, etc. It exposes blocks/sectors (typically 512B or 4096B logical sectors).
• Partition map / partition table. The low‑level map on a disk that defines where partitions live: GPT (modern), MBR (legacy). On Macs, GPT is standard.
• Logical drive / volume. A storage construct that lives on top of a device (or multiple devices). Examples: APFS or HFS+ volumes on macOS; NTFS/FAT/exFAT volumes on Windows; RAID/LVM/Storage Spaces virtual volumes; encrypted containers. A single physical disk can host several volumes. Conversely, one logical volume can span multiple physical disks (e.g., Fusion Drive, dynamic/pooled volumes). On macOS with APFS, volumes share space inside a container instead of using fixed‑size partitions.
• File system. The structure that stores files/folders on a volume (APFS, HFS+, NTFS, exFAT, FAT32, etc.).

How Disk Drill Represents Devices vs. Volumes (Icon Guide)

1) Native OS Icons (Default)

Disk Drill adopts the same icon you’d see in your OS:

• macOS examples: internal vs. external vs. removable disk icons. For instance, Finder commonly shows orange icons for external disks and white for removable devices; Disk Drill mirrors that behavior.
• Windows examples: drive icons for fixed, removable; BitLocker/volume states may appear with OS‑provided overlays.

2) When Disk Drill Uses Custom Icons

Disk Drill introduces a small, neutral set of custom icons only when:

• The OS doesn’t supply a meaningful icon for the target (e.g., certain RAW/uninitialized devices, reconstructed/lost partitions, or composite sources).
• The item is Disk Drill–specific, such as Byte‑to‑Byte Backup images (backup files default to the .dd or .dmg extension)

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