Introduction

Disk management is an important aspect of optimizing and maintaining any PC, and Windows Server 2003 includes a variety of tools that the administrator can use to format, partition, organize, and optimize disks. In this chapter, we take a look at how the operating system enables you to interface with the physical and logical disks in your machine, and how you can optimize disk performance to increase the overall performance of your server.

Like Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 supports two disk types: basic and dynamic. Upgrading your disks to dynamic status enables you to take advantage of the operating system s software RAID support, so that you can create fault-tolerant volumes. A regular schedule of defragmentation is another way you can enhance disk performance, and in this chapter, we will show you how to use both the graphical interface and command-line tools to defragment your disks and perform other disk management tasks. You will also learn to configure disk quotas for better management of disk space on the file server, and we show you how to use the Remote Storage feature to manage volumes. Finally, we will discuss basic troubleshooting techniques for tracking down problems with disks and volumes.

Understanding Disk Terminology and Concepts

Computers use hard disks for storing information, but hard disks are not the only place where information is stored. Computers can store information more quickly in cache memory and random access memory (RAM), but this information is lost when we...