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Managing Disks : Managing Dynamic Storage - Creating an Extended Volume

7/23/2011 9:20:23 AM
The Disk Management utility offers support for managing storage. You can create, delete, and format partitions or volumes on your hard drives. You can also extend or shrink volumes on dynamic disks. Additionally, you can delete volume sets and striped sets. The first topic I am going to cover is dynamic storage and volumes.

Managing Dynamic Storage

A dynamic disk can contain simple, spanned, or striped volumes. Through the Disk Management utility, you can create volumes of each type. You can also create an extended volume, which is the process of adding disk space to a single simple volume. The following sections describe these disk-management tasks.

1. Creating Simple, Spanned, and Striped Volumes

As explained earlier, you use the New Volume Wizard to create a new volume. To start the New Volume Wizard, in the Disk Management utility right-click an area of free space where you want to create the volume. Then, you can choose the type of volume you want to create: simple, spanned, or striped.

When you choose to create a spanned volume, you are creating a new volume from scratch that includes space from two or more physical drives, up to a maximum of 32 drives.

When you choose to create a striped volume, you are creating a new volume that combines free space from 2 to 32 drives into a single logical partition. The free space on all drives must be equal in size. Data in the striped volume is written across all drives in 64 KB stripes. (Data in spanned and extended volumes is written sequentially.)

Striped volumes are RAID-0 because striped volumes do not offer any type of redundancy. Striped volumes offer you better performance and are normally used for temporary files or folders. The problem with a striped volume is if you lose one of the drives in the volume, the entire striped volume is lost.

Another option that you have with volumes is extending the volumes to create a larger storage area. In the next section we will look at extending volumes.

2. Creating Extended Volumes

When you create an extended volume, you are taking a single, simple volume (maybe one that is almost out of disk space) and adding more disk space to it, using free space that exists on the same physical hard drive. When the volume is extended, it is seen as a single drive letter. To extend a volume, the simple volume must be formatted as NTFS. You cannot extend a system or boot partition.

An extended volume assumes that you are using only one physical drive. A spanned volume assumes that you are using two or more physical drives. Exercise 1 shows you how to create an extended volume.

Exercise 1: Creating an Extended Volume

  1. In the Disk Management utility, right-click the volume you want to extend and choose Extend Volume.

  2. The Extend Volume Wizard starts. Click Next.

  3. The Select Disks screen appears. You can specify the maximum size of the extended volume. The maximum size you can specify is determined by the amount of free space that exists in all of the dynamic drives on your computer. Click Next to continue.



  4. The Completing The Extend Volume Wizard screen appears. Click the Finish button.


Once a volume is extended, no portion of the volume can be deleted without losing data on the entire set. (However, you can shrink a volume without losing data by using the Shrink Volume option in Disk Management.)

Real World Scenario: You're Running Out of Disk Space

Crystal, a user on your network, is running out of disk space. The situation needs to be corrected so she can be brought back up and running as quickly as possible. Crystal has a 250 GB drive (C:) that runs a very large customer database. She needs additional space added to the C: drive so the database will recognize the data because it must be stored on a single drive letter. Crystal's computer has a single IDE drive with nothing attached to the second IDE channel.

You have two basic options for managing space in these circumstances. One is to upgrade the disk to a larger disk, but this will necessitate reinstalling the OS and the applications and restoring the user's data. The other choice is to add a temporary second drive and extend the volume. This will at least allow Crystal to be up and running-but it should not be considered a permanent solution. If you do choose to extend the volume and then either drive within the volume set fails, the user will lose access to both drives. When Crystal's workload allows time for maintenance, you can replace the volume set with a single drive.


One issue you may run into with hard drives is that they go bad from time to time. If you have never heard a hard drive fail, it is a distinct clicking. Once you have experienced it, you will never forget it. When drives go bad, Disk Management can help determine which drive and what the issue may be. In the next section, we will look at hard disk errors.
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