[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]
Physical media are the tangible RSM media objects. Optical disks and magnetic tapes are examples of physical media.
Physical media are referenced by physical media IDs (PMIDs). RSM applications use PMIDs to perform operations normally associated with tangible media, such as eject, enable, disable, and delete media. RSM uses PMIDs to perform these operations because the operations affect all partitions of a piece of media.
In libraries that include a bar-code reader, physical media might have bar codes as well as sequence numbers.