Basics of Disk Management in 2000

1. Disk Storage Type

Basic Storage:

Initially a disk is used as the base storage. The newly added disk is also used as a basic disk. And it is compatible with WindowNT4.0. The Basic Disk can contain up to 4 basic partitions or 3 basic partitions plus one extended partition.

Dynamic Storage:

Compared to basic storage, there are several advantages. Volume sets can be extended to include non-contiguous disk space; there is no limit to the number of volume sets that can be created on a disk; disk configuration information is stored on disk, not the registry or other places that are not conducive to updates. Disk configuration information is also copied to other dynamic disks.

Dynamic Disk Volume Type:

Simple Volume------ Contains Disk Space on a Single Disk

Spanned Volume----- Contains 2 or More The disk space on (up to 32) disks is similar to the Volume Set in NT4.0.

Mirrored Volume---Two identical copies of a single volume, one on each hard disk. It provides fault tolerance. Mirror Set similar to NT4.0

Striped Volume-----Combines multiple (2 to 32) Free Spaces on a disk to a volume. Similar to Stripe Set in NT4.0

RAID-5 Volume-----Equivalent to Striped Volume with fault tolerance, requiring at least three hard drives. Similar to Stripe Set With Parity in NT4.0

2. Disk Management

If you are a member of the Administrators or Server Operators group, you can use Disk on any computer running Win2000. Management to manage the hard disk of the local computer, other computers in the domain, or trusted domain computers. Disk Management is a Snap-ins of MMC. Disk Management has two commands: Refresh and Rescan Disks are used to refresh disk configuration information.

3. Create Dynamic Volumes

Convert Storage Type:

Right-click on a Basic Disk and click Upgrade to Dynamic Disk. When the upgrade is complete, the existing partition will become the volume. The conversion law is as follows:

System/boot partition---------->Simple Volume

Basic partition---------->Simple Volume

Extended Partition/Logical Disk---------->Simple Volume

Volume Set---------->Spanned Volume

Band Set---------->Striped Volume

Disk Mirror Set----------〉Mirrored Volume

Parity Strip Set- --------->RAID-5 Volume

Any disk that you want to convert must contain at least 1MB of free space (Unallocated Space). If you want to convert from Dynamic Disk to Basic Disk, you should delete it first. Right-click on all the volumes on the disk, right-click on a Dynamic Disk, and then click Revert to Basic Disk.

Managing Drive Path:

You can mount your local drive to an empty folder. This folder should be in an NTFS partition formatted with Win2000. The folder can be named with an intuitive name, and as the user sees, he stores the data in a folder instead of the drive.