• Home
• Configuring Hard Disks - MCSE Prep

2.3: Configuring Hard Disks

Windows Server 2003 provides support for two types of disk storage: basic storage, which uses basic disks and is the standard storage type; and dynamic storage, which uses dynamic disks. Basic disks can be divided into up to four partitions that can either be primary partitions or extended partitions. You can have multiple primary partitions but only one extended partition. You can create multiple primary partitions to which enables you to dual boot between Windows Server 2003 and other operating systems such as Windows XP Professional and Windows 98. One of the primary partitions must be set in fdisk as the active partition as the boot files required to start the operating systems must be located on the active partition.

Basic disks can be converted to dynamic disks from which dynamic volumes can be created. Windows Server 2003 supports five types of dynamic volumes: simple volumes; spanned volumes; striped volumes; mirrored volumes; and striped volumes with parity.

2.3.2: Converting to Dynamic Disk Status

By default, all disks in Windows Server 2003 are configured as basic disks but you can convert them to dynamic disks. No data loss is incurred when converting to dynamic disks, however, if you convert a disk that is currently being accessed, such as the boot or system disks, you must reboot the computer in order to perform the conversion. To convert your system disk from basic disks to dynamic disks, do the following:

Once you have converted to dynamic disks, you cannot covert them back to basic disks without incurring data loss. Thus, to convert back to basic disks, you must back up your data, and then delete the dynamic volumes. You can then convert the disk back to basic using the Disk Management MMC or the diskpart utility.

2.3.3: Creating Simple Volumes

Simple volumes are the default volume type on a dynamic disk. A simple volume is created from the free space on a single physical disk and is not fault tolerant. To create a simple volume, do the following:

2.3.4: Creating Spanned Volumes

Spanned volumes contain disk space from up to 32 physical disks. This enables you to group different disks of the same or different sizes and access them as if they were one disk. However, only one disk in the volume is written to at a time. Spanned volumes provide 100 percent drive utilization but is not fault tolerant. To create a spanned volume, do the following:

2.3.5: Creating Striped Volumes

Like spanned volumes, striped volumes allow you to combine the free space from two to 32 physical disks into one logical volume. Unlike spanned volumes, the amount of unallocated space on each of the disks that is part of the volume must be of the same size. Striped volumes increase both read and write performance when accessing the volume by utilizing all the disks at one time. Striped volumes cannot be extended. To create a striped volume, do the following:

2.3.6: Creating Mirrored Volumes

Mirrored volumes require exactly two disks that are of the same size. When information is written to a mirror volume, the same information is written to each disk. This provides fault tolerance and complete redundancy for your data. Should one disk fail, you can use the mirrored copy. Because the same information is written to two disks, mirrored volumes provide only 50% disk utilization. Mirrored volumes also cannot be extended.

2.3.7: Creating Striped Volumes with Parity RAID-5 Volumes

Striped volumes with parity are also called RAID-5 volumes and can be created using three to 32 disks. They provide fault tolerance by calculating parity information, which can be used to recreate the data on the other disks, and writing it to a block on one disk as part of the striping operation. Data is striped across all the disks in the volume, while parity information is written to one disk in each stripe. The parity information can be used to regenerate the missing data should one disk fail. If you lose more than one disk, however, all your data will be lost.

As with mirrored volumes, RAID-5 volumes cannot be extended. However, RAID-5 volumes offer more efficient disk utilization than mirrored volumes. You lose the storage space of one disk in the RAID-5 volume because it is used for parity information. To create a RAID-5 Volume, do the following:

Click finish to complete the process