■ Volume Label Specifies a text label for the partition. This label is the partition’s volume name.
■ Perform A Quick Format Tells Windows to format without checking the partition for errors. With large partitions, this option can save you a few minutes. However, it’s more prudent to check for errors, which allows Disk Management to mark bad sectors on the disk and lock them out.
■ Enable File And Folder Compression Turns on compression for the disk. Compression is transparent to users, and compressed files can be accessed just like regular files. If you select this option, files and directories on this drive are compressed automatically. For more information about compressing drives, files, and directories, see “Compressing drives and data” in Chapter 1. (For NTFS only)
7. Tap or click Next, and then tap or click Finish.
Deleting volumes and volume sets
You use the same technique to delete all volumes, whether they’re simple, spanned, mirrored, striped, or RAID-5 (striped with parity). Deleting a volume set removes the associated file system, and all associated data is lost. Before you delete a volume set, you should back up any files and directories the volume set contains.
You can’t delete a volume that contains the system, boot, or active paging files for Windows Server 2012 R2.
To delete volumes, follow these steps:
1. In Disk Management, press and hold or right-click any volume in the set, and then tap or click Delete Volume. You can’t delete a portion of a spanned volume without deleting the entire volume.
2. Tap or click Yes to confirm that you want to delete the volume.
Managing volumes
You manage volumes much like you manage partitions. Follow the techniques outlined in “Managing existing partitions and drives” later in this chapter.
Improving performance and fault tolerance with RAID
You’ll often want to give important data increased protection from drive failures. To do this, you can use RAID technology to add fault tolerance to your file systems. With RAID, you increase data integrity and availability by creating redundant copies of the data. You can also use RAID to improve your disks’ performance.
Different implementations of RAID technology are available, and these implementations are described in terms of levels. Each RAID level offers different features.
Windows Server 2012 R2 supports RAID levels 0, 1, and 5. You can use RAID-0 to improve the performance of your drives, and you use RAID-1 and RAID-5 to provide fault tolerance for data.
Table 2–2 provides a brief overview of the supported RAID levels. This support is completely software-based.
The most common RAID levels in use on servers running Windows Server 2012 R2 are level 1 (disk mirroring), and level 5 (disk striping with parity). With respect to upfront costs, disk mirroring is the least expensive way to increase data protection with redundancy. Here, you use two identically sized volumes on two different drives to create a redundant data set. If one of the drives fails, you can still obtain the data from the other drive.
However, disk striping with parity requires more disks — a minimum of three — but offers fault tolerance with less overhead than disk mirroring. If any of the drives fail, you can recover the data by combining blocks of data on the remaining disks with a parity record. Parity is a method of error checking that uses an exclusive OR operation to create a checksum for each block of data written to the disk. This checksum is used to recover data in case of failure.
TABLE 2–2 Windows Server 2012 R2 support for RAID
| RAID LEVEL | RAID TYPE | DESCRIPTION | MAJOR ADVANTAGES |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Disk striping | Add the disks that contain the rest of the spanned volumes, and then import all the disks at one time. | Speed and performance. |
| 1 | Disk mirroring | Two volumes on two drives are configured identically. Data is written to both drives. If one drive fails, no data loss occurs because the other drive contains the data. (This level doesn’t include disk striping.) | Redundancy. Better write performance than disk striping with parity. |
| 5 | Disk striping with parity | Uses three or more volumes, each on a separate drive, to create a striped set with parity error checking. In the case of failure, data can be recovered. | Fault tolerance with less overhead than mirroring. Better read performance than disk mirroring. |
REAL WORLD Although it’s true that the upfront costs for mirroring should be less than the upfront costs for disk striping with parity, the actual cost per gigabyte might be higher with disk mirroring. With disk mirroring, you have an overhead of 50 percent. For example, if you mirror two 750-gigabyte (GB) drives (a total storage space of 1500 GB), the usable space is only 750 GB. With disk striping with parity, on though, you have an overhead of around 33 percent. For example, if you create a RAID-5 set by using three 500-GB drives (a total storage space of 1500 GB), the usable space (with one-third lost for overhead) is 1,000 GB.
Implementing RAID on Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows Server 2012 R2 supports disk mirroring, disk striping, and disk striping with parity. Implementing these RAID techniques is discussed in the sections that follow.
CAUTION Some operating systems, such as MS-DOS, don’t support RAID. If you dual boot your system to one of these noncompliant operating systems, your RAID-configured drives will be unavailable.
Implementing RAID-0: disk striping
RAID level 0 is disk striping. With disk striping, two or more volumes-each on a separate drive-are configured as a striped set. Data written to the striped set is broken into blocks called stripes. These stripes are written sequentially to all drives in the striped set. You can place volumes for a striped set on up to 32 drives, but in most circumstances sets with 2 to 5 volumes offer the best performance improvements. Beyond this, the performance improvement decreases significantly.
The major advantage of disk striping is speed. Data can be accessed on multiple disks by using multiple drive heads, which improves performance considerably.
However, this performance boost comes with a price tag. As with volume sets, if any hard disk drive in the striped set fails, the striped set can no longer be used, which essentially means that all data in the striped set is lost. You need to re-create the striped set and restore the data from backups. Data backup and recovery is discussed in Chapter 11, “Data backup and recovery.”