CREATE AN ADDITIONAL SHARE NAME FOR A FOLDER

10-5Lesson 1 Managing and Troubleshooting Disks and Volumes

Windows XP supports the following types of dynamic volumes

Simple volume A simple volume can contain disk space from a single disk and can

be extended if necessary.

Spanned volume A spanned volume can contain disk space from 2 or more (up to

a maximum of 32) disks. The amount of disk space from each disk can vary. You

will most often use spanned volumes when a simple volume is running low on

disk space and you need to extend the volume by using space on another hard

disk. You can continue to extend spanned volumes to include areas from addi-

tional hard disks as necessary. When Windows writes data to a spanned volume,

it writes data to the area on the first disk until the area is filled, and then writes

data to the area on the second disk, and so on. There is no fault tolerance in

spanned volumes. If any of the disks containing the spanned volume fail, you lose

all data in the entire spanned volume.

Striped volume A striped volume can contain disk space from 2 or more (up to a

maximum of 32) disks. Unlike spanned volumes, striped volumes require that you

use an identical amount of disk space from each disk. When Windows writes data

to a striped volume, it divides the data into 64 KB chunks and writes to the disks

in a fixed order. Thus, Windows will split a 128 KB file into two 64 KB chunks,

and then stores each chunk on a separate disk. Striped volumes provide increased

performance because it is faster to read or write two smaller pieces of a file on two

drives than to read or write the entire file on a single drive. However, you cannot

extend striped volumes, and they provide no fault tolerance. If any of the disks

that contain the striped volume fail, you lose all data on the volume. Striped vol-

umes are also referred to as RAID-0.

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Exam Tip Windows XP Professional does not support fault-tolerant disk configurations.

Spanned volumes simply allow you to use different amounts of disk space from multiple hard

disks in a single volume. Striped volumes allow you use an identical amount of disk space

from multiple hard disks. The advantage of using striped volumes is that Windows can write

information to the disk more quickly.

Real World Supporting Multiple Operating Systems

Basic disks are generally sufficient for a computer with a single hard disk. There

are really two situations in which you might want to use a dynamic disk. The first

is if you need to extend a volume to contain unallocated disk space that is not

contiguous (for example, if you have extra free space on the same disk, but not

directly adjacent to the volume you need to extend, or if you have free space on

another disk). The second reason is if you want to configure a striped volume to

increase read/write speed.

If you plan to use multiple operating systems on the same computer, your choice

of disk types will be limited by the operating systems you want to install.

Although multibooting is not used as much as it used to be, it continues to be a

useful feature if you are using Windows XP but occasionally need to replicate

older computing environments. (You will probably find an alternate solution such

as Microsoft Virtual PC more efficient and easy to configure.) If you decide to use

multibooting, you are limited in the following ways:

■

If you need to install Windows XP Professional along with any operating sys-

tem other than Windows 2000 Professional, you must use a basic disk. You

should create a primary disk partition for each operating system.

■

If you have a single dynamic disk, you can install only one operating system:

Windows XP Professional or Windows 2000 Professional (the only desktop

operating systems that support dynamic disks).

■

If you have two or more hard disks installed in your computer, each dynamic

disk can contain one installation of Windows XP Professional or Windows