Windows Server® 2008 Bible

Chapter 14. Windows Server 2008 File Systems

IN THIS CHAPTER

• An Overview of disk structure

• FAT16 and FAT32

• NTFS

• Choosing a file system

• Optimizing storage capacity

• Managing the Distributed File System

• Working with mounted volumes

• Network File Systems

This chapter explores the many aspects of the Windows Server 2008 file system, including file system structure, the Distributed File System (DFS), auditing, and system repair and recovery.

An Overview of Disk Structure

To understand the file system options in Windows Server 2008, you first need to understand some basic physical disk concepts and terms. This section covers concepts and terms that will help you understand file system structure in Windows Server 2008. This chapter does not cover basic hardware storage concepts such as heads and head gap in detail because these topics aren't germane to an understanding of file systems. This chapter focuses mainly on logical disk structure, rather than physical disk structure, but let's take a quick look at how physical and logical structure relate to each other.

The circular path a head traverses as it sits motionless over a disk platter is called a track. The tracks are magnetically encoded on the disk during formatting and define the physical structure of the disk's storage space. The tracks that reside in the same location on each platter form a cylinder. Each track is divided into a certain number of sectors, the number of which depends on the disk type and location of the track on the disk. Sectors ...