If you need to manage anything related to your disks
or your volumes in Windows, then you
need to use the Disk Management utility.
One of the easiest ways to start this utility
is inside of Computer Management.
You can choose Storage and Disk Management.
One important consideration when using the Disk Management
tool, some of the tasks that you can perform inside
of Disk Management will delete your data
and it will be unrecoverable.
So make sure you know exactly what you're
doing when you make any changes inside of the Disk Management
utility.
Inside of Disk Management, every drive
is assigned a disk status.
For example, a drive will show a volume name, a drive letter
if one is assigned, the size of the drive,
the type of file system on the drive, and then the status.
The status of this particular drive is Healthy.
That means that this volume is working normally and exactly as
expected.
It might say Heavy and show At Risk,
which means that this drive is currently operating,
but it has experienced input and output errors.
And it's possible that this drive could be failing.
If this is a new drive and you're
in the process of initializing this drive,
you'll see the disk status message Initializing,
which is perfectly normal when working with those new drives.
If the drive cannot be started, you could have a bad drive
or a bad file system.
You'll see a disk status that says Failed.
If you have a RAID 1 or a RAID 5 array inside of your computer
and one of those disks has failed,
the disk status will show that you have a failed redundancy.
At that point, you'll need to reboot the bad drive
and replace it with a known good drive.
If this is a RAID 1 or a mirrored array,
that means that you'll now have a brand new drive.
And all of that information will need
to be copied from one drive to the other.
This is called resynching.
So if you are running RAID 1 and you've just replaced the drive,
the disk status will show you that there is
a resynching process occurring.
With RAID 5, we have to rebuild data.
We're not simply copying data to the new drive.
So with RAID 5, the disk status will
show that it is regenerating or recreating
the data based on the parity that was missing
in that missing drive.
With storage space, especially storage space
that's on a server, you never have enough free space.
You're always going to be running out of available drive
space on that device.
There are some ways that you can extend
the size of some of the space that's on that drive.
One of them is to mount a drive.
This allows you to extend the space.
But instead of it looking like a completely separate drive
that you've installed, you create a new set of storage
that looks like a folder that's in the existing drive
structure.
This is seamless to the user.
They don't even realize that it's a new drive that's
been added to the system.
And this provides an instant way to increase
the amount of storage space on that device.
We're looking at a server that's used by the accounting
department.
And they've created a series of folders
within their accounting storage area
for Quarter 1, Quarter 2, Quarter 3, and Quarter 4.
Well, now we've come to the end of the year
and they need additional drive space available.
Instead of creating a separate drive
and creating a separate share from that drive,
we're simply going to mount a new folder
inside of this drive that's pointing
to an extra 120-gig SSD that we found.
Inside of the Disk Management, you
can see that we already have installed that 120-gig drive.
It's not been assigned a drive letter,
so we're going to right mouse click, Change Drive Letter
and Paths, and choose Add.
Instead of selecting "Assign the following drive letter,"
and assigning a separate drive letter to that,
we're going to mount this in an empty NTFS folder.
In this particular case, I'll choose Browse.
We'll choose the C drive.
I want to put this in my Users/Professor folder.
I have some documents accounting.
And you can see the Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 folders are under that.
I want to create a new folder for Year End and click OK.
That's exactly where I'd like that drive to be.
We'll click OK.
And it will now assign that or mount that drive
into a separate folder inside of that directory called Year End.
And now I have 120 extra gig of drive space
that they can use to finish all of their year-end reports.
You may run into a situation where
you need additional drive space used for something
different than what you originally planned.
For example, we may have decided that the accounting department
really only needs 60 gigabytes of disk space, which
means we can use the other 60 for some other purpose.
If we right mouse click on that 120-gig volume,
we have the option to shrink that volume.
And it specifies the total size before shrink,
which is 122,862 megabytes and the size of the available
that we have.
Since no data has been written to this drive,
most of the drive is available for us to be able to shrink.
We're going to have to specify the space in megabytes.
In this particular case, we'll choose 60,000
to specify that 60 gigabytes, which leaves 62,862 afterwards
and we click the Shrink button.
At that point now, we have two separate volumes
that have been created-- one that
is our existing volume for the year-end information
for accounting.
And now we have an additional 60 gig
that we could use for other purposes.
Of course, you may have to extend that volume later
to fit more information in, so you can always
right mouse click, extend the volume,
and then we're going to specify that extra 60,000
on that unallocated drive.
And we're going to add, let's say,
an additional 20,000 or 20 gigabytes to that
to make that drive just a little bit bigger
for the folks in the accounting department.
In some editions of Windows, you're
able to create a mirrored or a striped set of volumes
that you could use for redundancy.
Let's create a mirrored 120-gig volume
for the accounting department.
We've installed now a separate 120-gig drive.
And if we right mouse click on one of those,
we could choose New Mirrored Volume.
The New Mirrored Volume Wizard says
that this will help us create this volume.
So we'll click Next.
And we see that we have two disks--
the one that we have selected plus the other that
is available.
We'll choose that one, since that's
the only other choice that we have
available to create a mirror.
Both of these drives are exactly the same size.
And we'll click Next.
At this point, we can assign either a drive letter
or we could mount that particular volume
in an NTFS folder.
In this case, let's choose drive letter E and click Next.
This will now format the volume with NTFS.
It'll be called New Volume.
And in this case, we'll choose "Perform a quick format,"
and then we'll click Next.
The new Mirrored volume Wizard gives us a description
of what our settings are.
And we'll click Finish.
Disk Management now says that this operation
will convert the selected basic disks to dynamic disks.
If you convert the disks to dynamic,
you will not be able to start installed operating systems
from any volume on the disks except the current boot volume.
Are you sure you want to continue?
In our case, these are simple data volumes.
We will not be booting any operating systems,
so we'll choose "Yes."
Once Windows finishes the format,
we now have a new volume, drive E.
That new drive E is a 120-gig drive to the end users.
But for us, we know that these are actually
two separate drives that contain redundant information that
is being mirrored by the operating system.
If you want to take this idea of adding or removing storage
to the next level, you may want to look at a Windows feature
called Storage Spaces.
This is primarily designed for cloud-based systems or data
centers so that they can easily add or remove storage space.
This also adds a lot of flexibility
with the management of this space.
You have different tiers of space
that you can make available and different types
of administrative control that you can assign
to those particular spaces.
The first thing that's created for storage space
is a storage pool.
This is a group of storage devices
that you've put together.
You can combine many different types
of drives with different sizes to create
one large pool of storage, and then you
can add or remove different drives
from that pool as needed.
Now that you've created a pool of storage,
you can now start creating spaces from that storage.
And you can allocate virtual disks from the available space
that you have in that pool.
You can specify that these are standalone virtual disks.
They could also be mirrored virtual disks
or striped virtual disks.
You can also build hot spares into these virtual drive
arrays.
So if you happen to have a mirrored array that
loses a drive, the hot spare is immediately
available to act as a replacement drive.
You can immediately resynchronize that data
and maintain the redundancy.