Disk Management does exactly what it sounds like. It manages the disks and volumes in Windows for individual computers and file servers.
To start Disk Management, open up Computer Management and choose Storage then Disk Management.
Note that Disk Management can erase data so make sure you are careful when working in this utility.
Drive status
Every disk is assigned a status:
- Healthy: The volume is working as it should
- Healthy (At Risk): The volume is currently working but has experienced input/output errors and the drive may be failing.
- Initializing: Normal status message when you have a new drive and are in the process of setting it up.
- Failed: Drive can’t be starte automatically. The disk may be damaged or the file system is corrupted.
- Failed redundancy: A drive has failed in a RAID1 or RAID5 array.
- Resynching: The disk in a mirrored RAID1 volume is syncing data between the drives.
- Regeneratin: The disk in a RAID 5 volume is recreating data based on the parity data.
Mounting
Mounting drives allows you to extend available storage space. Instead of having the mounted storage look like a totally separate drive, you can mount the storage device as a folder within the existing drive structure.
Initializing
Extending partitions
Extending partitions allow you to increase the amount of storage that a volume is allocated.
To extend a partition, right click on the volume and select Extend Volume.
Splitting partitions
Shrink partitions
Shrink partitions allow you to reduce the amount of storage that a volume is allocated.
To shrink a partition, right click on the partition, and choose Shrink Volume.
Assigning/changing drive letters
Adding drives
Adding arrays
Some editions of Windows will allow you to create RAID arrays. For example, to create a mirrored array, where 2 disks are the duplicate of each other, you’d right click on one of the disks and select New Mirrored Volume, which will start up the New Mirrored Volume Wizard. The disks will then be converted from basic disks to dynamic disks and wont be able to start operating systems from any volume on the disk except for the current boot volume.
Storage spaces
Storage spaces was introduced in Windows 8. With Storage Spaces you can combine storage space from multiple drives of various types and interfaces into a single large pool of storage (called storage pool) that can be accessed as a single volume. If you combine disks with different data transfer speeds, the overall speed will only be a little bit higher than the speed of the slowest disk.
Once you have your storage pool, can create different storage spaces. You can allocate virtual disks from the available space that you have in the pool. You can set up standalone virtual disks. Or they can be set up as mirrorred or with parity. Hot spares can also be configured.
Storage Spaces was designed for data centers and cloud infrastructures.
Some caveats to Storage Spaces is that you can’t use your system volume in Storage Spaces, and you can’t boot from a Storage Spaces volume.
When setting up Storage Spaces, you’ll be prompted to choose a Resiliency setting, which is the ability to protect your data in the case that one of the disks fails. The resiliency options are:
- Simple: No resiliency. This setting requires a minimum of 1 drive. This type does not protect data in case of disk failure. If one disk fails, all data is lost on the entire volume. This is similar to RAID 0.
- Two way mirror: This resiliency requires at least two drives. It’s similar to RAID 1, and will protect your data if one drive fails.
- Parity: Requires at least 3 drives. This is similar to RAID 5. One drive can fail without any loss of data. Read performance is slower than two-way mirror. Parity is best used for large files that don’t change often.
- Three way mirror: Requires at least 5 drives. Two drives can fail simultaneously and your data won’t be lost. It’s similar to RAID 10.
Resiliency type can’t be changed later without undoing the storage space and reformatting. However, you can add more drives to an existing storage space later.
