Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Glenn Weadock
MDAA, MCAAA, MCT, MCSE, MCSA, MCITP, A+, SECURITY+
gweadock@i-sw.com www.i-sw.com
Topics in
This Module Disks, volumes, and file systems
MMC, PowerShell, and DISKPART
VHD and VHDX storage
Storage spaces
Removable devices
Disks, Volumes, and File Systems
Definition of “disk:”
A physical storage device that may be
subdivided into partitions and volumes
A “virtual” disk is a file that emulates a
physical disk.
Types of Disks
Hybrid disks
- Smaller SSD caching larger spinning disk
Mirrored (Dynamic)
- Fault tolerance
Spanned (Dynamic)
- Capacity utilization
Striped (Dynamic)
- I/O performance
¹In Windows 10/11 with 2MB clusters; limits are 256TB for
more common 64K clusters
²Limitation of Disk Management formatter; otherwise 2TB
File System Notes
ReFS
- Very limited use in Windows 10/11
(mirrored Storage Spaces)
- Self-healing in real time
exFAT
- MS proprietary format for flash drives
with large files
FAT32
- No security ACLs
- Common for flash drives
Demo
VHDX (default)
- 64TB max
- Windows 8+
- More robust, esp. with dynamically
expanding disks
Uses for VHD and VHDX
Client Hyper-V
- Storage for virtual machines
Differencing (AVHDX)
- Links to parent of same type
Virtual Disk-related PowerShell
Convert-VHD
Mount-VHD; Dismount-VHD
New-VHD
Optimize-VHD
Resize-VHD
Demo
Three-way mirror
- ≥ 5 drives; 2 can fail
2 2
3 3
4 4
DISK 1 DISK 2
Parity Sets
3 P2 4
P3 5 6
7 8 P4
+ redistributed
Control panel: “Optimize to spread existing
data across all drives”
PowerShell: Optimize-StoragePool
Add in multiples of existing set
Removing a Drive from a Storage Space
Encryption for:
- Removable flash memory (USB, SD)
- External hard drives