OVERVIEW OF DISK

VOLUMES
Overview of disk volumes

When selecting a type of disk for

use in Windows Server, you can
choose between:
• Basic disk: Contains partitions
• Dynamic disk: volumes contain
dynamic disks. Volumes can
contain up to 32 disk. Volumes
combine individual disk into one
drive.
Overview of disk volumes
• In Windows Server, if you are using dynamic disks, you can create a number of
different types of disk volumes:
• Simple volumes : This is just one dynamic disk
• Spanned volumes: This consist of disks combined to one drive. When one disk
is full, it writes unto the next drive.
• Striped volumes: This consist of disks combined to one drive. With striped
volumes, data is concurrently saved unto all the disks. The benefit of this is
that there is performance increase.
NB: There is no redundancy (fault tolerance) with spanned or striped volumes.
If one disk fails, your volume will be inaccessible.
• Mirrored volumes: : This consist of disks combined to one drive. This
combines the content of one disk unto another disk. If one disk fails, you can
boot from the next drive which has the exact copy of your data. This is usually
used to backup up operating system files. This is also known as RAID 1.
• RAID-5 volumes: This requires a minimum of three disk. Data is written unto
one disk along with parity information (heavily compressed information from
other drives). If one disk fails, the data on that disk can be recovered using
parity from other disks.
• NB: check the Resource Monitor tab to view disk activity of your server
Understanding Storage Pools
What are Storage Spaces?
Storage Spaces are used to:
• Add physical disks of any type and size to a storage pool
• Create highly-available virtual disks from the pool:
• To create a virtual disk, you need:
• One or more physical disks
• A storage pool that includes the disks
• Virtual disks (or storage spaces) that are created with disks from the
storage pool
• Disk drives that are based on virtual drives
NB: Storage pools are only used to stored data files (Operating
system disk cannot be part of the storage pool). You also need
multiple physical drives connected to your server.
Storage pools can be found in Files and Storage services.
Storage Spaces usage scenarios

Storage Spaces was designed to enable storage administrators to:

• Implement and easily manage scalable, reliable, and inexpensive
storage
• Use inexpensive storage with or without external storage
• Combine multiple drives into storage pools that administrators can
manage as a single entity
• Implement different types of storage in the same pool
• Grow storage pools as required
• Provision storage as required from existing