Most of the complications can be learned after you get comfortable with a basic model. It is entirely true things have got more complicated but the key concepts and most importantly (to me) the language of what disks are comes from their history. The whole block/sector/inner/outer and cache/written and addressing models, comes from the realities of spinning objects. We didn't inherit very many concepts from mercury delay lines in the longer term, but we did from core memory because addressing models "made sense" in the X/Y plane model they exposed and we carried some of that into the future, and into disk sector/block models.
Shingled, SMR, CVR, checksums, RAID, RAM backed, the impact of VM models, L1 and L2 cache, unified file buffer caches.. its all addons which assume you have the basic language around disk "concepts"
Shingled, SMR, CVR, checksums, RAID, RAM backed, the impact of VM models, L1 and L2 cache, unified file buffer caches.. its all addons which assume you have the basic language around disk "concepts"