The official blog of the Windows and Windows Server storage engineering teams
Updating the firmware for disks has historically been a cumbersome task with a potential for downtime, which is why we’re making improvements to Storage Spaces and Windows Server 2016 to enable you to more easily update disk firmware prior to placing a server in production. You can also use this new functionality to update the… Read more
ContextIn Windows Server 2012 R2, iSCSI Target Server made significant improvements in its persistence layer by providing larger, resilient, dynamically-growing SCSI Logical Units (LUs) that are based on the VHDX format. For more details on what is new in this release, see my previous blog post iSCSI Target Server in Windows Server 2012 R2. In… Read more
Introduction Today, Microsoft released a new white paper, available here, discussing best practices and guidance for sizing NTFS volumes and some details on CHKDSK execution times on Windows Server 2008 R2. When planning Windows file server deployments, we are often asked questions such as “How large can I make my volumes?” or “How long will… Read more
You can use DISKPART to check if the disk is a GPT disk. DISKPART> list disk Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt ——– ————- ——- ——- — — Disk 0 Online 233 GB 0 B Disk 1 Online 20 GB 20 GB * Disk 2 Online 20 GB 20 GB * Disk 3 Online … Read more
Recently, Microsoft Support released an update for Windows Server 2003 SP2 that allows Chkdsk.exe tool compact the NTFS security descriptor stream (a.k.a. $secure file). Depending on the file system usage, this descriptor can consume a lot of disk space. After getting to a certain size, no more security settings can be configured in NTFS…. Read more
Shrinking volumes is a cool feature of Windows Vista, but we’re starting to see an interesting side effect—the inability to create a new partition in the newly created unallocated space. Customers who face this problem almost always have a new computer that shipped from the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) with 4 primary partitions on the… Read more
Savvy beta testers have noticed that the option to create an extended partition is no longer available in Disk Management in Windows Vista. Instead, the only option is New Simple Volume. The type of volume this command creates depends on the number of partitions already on the disk. Creating the first, second, and third partition… Read more
Chat Topic: Disk and Volume ManagementDate: Friday, August 18, 2006Wendy [MSFT] (Moderator):Thank you for joining today’s chat with the Disk and Volume Management Team. We will begin the chat in 7 minutes. Feel free to start queuing up questions!Wendy [MSFT] (Moderator):Welcome to today’s chat with the Disk and Volume Management Team. We will try to… Read more
You can view it here: Disk and Volume Management chat trancript Enjoy! –Jill… Read more
Our very own Shobana Balakrishnan, a program manager on our Windows Longhorn Server team, takes you through the server roadmap and demonstrates Windows Server 2003 R2. Think you know everything about Windows Server? You might be surprised by the innovations this team has shipped and is planning on shipping in Longhorn Server. See the video!… Read more