Windows Server Cookbook

Chapter 3. Disks, Drives, and Volumes

Introduction

Before you can start using a filesystem on a server, you have to configure the disks, drives, and volumes. You have to split up the disks into volumes and assign drive letters to the volumes. You have to format a volume with a filesystem such as NTFS or FAT32. Filesystems are what give you features such as security, compression, and encryption of files and folders. Once you have usable volumes in place, there are many ongoing maintenance tasks you should do to keep your disks healthy. You’ll want to periodically defragment your volumes so that new files aren’t spread across many separate chunks, which decreases file access performance. You’ll want to check your volumes for errors to ensure there aren’t any bad sectors. And if you start running low on space, you may want to clean up a volume or see which users are using the most space. If disk space usage is a concern for you, you can implement the Windows quota feature that lets you limit the amount of space users’ use. In this chapter, I cover all of these tasks and more.

Using a Graphical User Interface

The two primary graphical interfaces for managing disks, drives, and volumes are Windows Explorer and the Disk Management snap-in. With Windows Explorer, you can right-click a drive, select Properties, and perform functions such as enabling quotas, running disk cleanup, performing defragmentation, and running an error check.

The Disk Management snap-in lets you perform lower-level ...