Chapter 19: Implementing Disk Management
In this chapter:
- Understanding Disk Terminology
- Overview of Disk Management
- Partitions and Volumes
- Setting Disk Quotas
- Enabling File Encryption
- Summary
Servers are used for many functions and have many reasons for existence, but the single most pervasive function of most servers is storage. And you can't store anything if you don't have something to store it on. For servers, that something is primarily hard disks. Rather than cover all topics related to storage in a single chapter, we've split it up a bit. Both for reasons of length (our editors have this irrational fear of 100+ pages chapters) and also to group topics together rationally.
In this chapter, we'll start by defining some terms that we'll use throughout our discussions of storage. Once we've got that basic ground covered, we'll move on to the physical aspects of storage—the disk subsystem and how you manage and administer it. This includes disks, partitions, and volumes, along with logical drives. And we'll cover special features of the NTFS file system, including encryption and quotas. Throughout this chapter, we'll cover both the graphical way to do things and the command-line way.
In Chapter 20, "Managing Storage," we'll shift gears and talk about storage from a logical perspective, with full coverage of the Storage Resource Manager, and we'll also cover Storage Area Networks (SANs)—a way to centralize and abstract storage for a group of servers.
The hard disk management functions of Windows Server 2008 build on earlier versions of Windows Server to make hard disk management flexible and easy for administrators while hiding the complexities from end users. One important—and long overdue—new feature is the ability to grow or shrink partitions dynamically without losing data.
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