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System Design Masterclass · Database Types Storage
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Open Finder on your Mac. Or File Explorer on Windows. You see folders. Inside folders, more folders. Inside those, files, documents, photos, videos, code.
That's file storage. You've been using it your entire life.
But here's the thing most developers never think about: when Netflix stores a 4K movie, they don't use file storage. When Instagram saves your photo, they don't use file storage. When Spotify serves a song to 500 million users, they definitely don't use file storage.
Why not? It's the most natural, human-readable storage model we have. So what's wrong with it?
Nothing, for the right use case. Everything, for the wrong one. And knowing the difference is what separates an engineer who builds systems that scale from one who builds systems that collapse under their own weight.
File storage organizes data in a hierarchy, a tree structure of directories and files. Every file has a path, like /home/roni/projects/readme.md. That path is its address. You navigate the tree to find what you need.
Internally, a file system (NTFS on Windows, ext4 on Linux, APFS on Mac) manages how bytes get written to disk. It handles:
When you access file storage over a network, you're typically using one of two protocols:
| Protocol | Full Name | Platform | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| NFS | Network File System | Linux/Unix | Shared drives in data centers |
| SMB/CIFS | Server Message Block | Windows | Office file shares, printers |
Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices, those boxes from Synology or QNAP, are purpose-built file servers. They sit on your network and expose directories over NFS or SMB.