Monitor, configure, and troubleshoot volumes.
Basic volumes
Include partitions and logical drives, as well
as volumes created using Windows NT 4.0, such as
volume sets, stripe sets, mirror sets, and
stripe sets with parity. In Windows 2000, these
volumes have been renamed to spanned volumes,
striped volumes, mirrored volumes, and RAID-5
volumes.
To format a basic volume, Right-click the
partition, logical drive, or basic volume you
want to format (or reformat), and then click
Format. (You cannot format the system or boot
partition)
Spanned volumes
A spanned volume is made up of disk space on
more than one physical disk. You can add more
space to a spanned volume by extending it at any
time.
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Can be created only on dynamic disks
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You need at least two dynamic disks to
create a spanned volume
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You can extend a spanned volume onto a
maximum of 32 dynamic disks
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Can not be mirrored or striped
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You can delete only entire spanned volumes.
Striped volumes
A striped volume stores data in stripes on two
or more physical disks. Data in a striped volume
is allocated alternately and evenly (in stripes)
to the disks of the striped volume. Striped
volumes improve the speed of access to your hard
disk.
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You need at least two dynamic disks to
create a striped volume.
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You can create a striped volume onto a
maximum of 32 disks.
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Striped volumes are not fault tolerant and
cannot be extended or mirrored
Mirrored volumes
A mirrored volume is a fault-tolerant volume
that duplicates your data on two physical disks.
It provides data redundancy by using a copy
(mirror) of the volume to duplicate the
information contained in the volume. The mirror
is located on a different disk. If one of the
physical disks fails, the data on the failed
disk becomes unavailable, but the system
continues to operate using the unaffected disk.
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You can create mirrored volumes only on
computers running Windows 2000 Server
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You need at least two dynamic disks to
create a mirrored volume.
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Mirrored volumes are fault tolerant.
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Mirrored volumes cannot be extended or
striped.
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The same drive letter is used for both
copies (mirrors) of a mirrored volume.
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Slower than a RAID-5 volume in read
operations but faster in write operations.
RAID-5 volumes
A RAID-5 volume is a fault-tolerant volume with
data and parity striped intermittently across
three or more physical disks. If a portion of a
physical disk fails, you can recreate the data
that was on the failed portion from the
remaining data and parity. RAID-5 volumes are a
good solution for data redundancy in a computer
environment in which most activity consists of
reading data.
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You can create RAID-5 volumes only on
computers running Windows 2000 Server.
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You need at least three dynamic disks to
create a RAID-5 volume.
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Can span a maximum of 32 disks.
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Provides fault tolerance
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Cannot be extended or mirrored
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