Quotas and volumes

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Quotas and volumes

Disk quotas apply only to volumes and are independent of folder structures of volumes and their layout on physical disks.

If a volume has multiple folders, the quotas assigned to that volume apply equally to all of the folders. For example, if \\Production\QA and \\Production\Public are shared folders on Volume F, files stored by users in these folders cannot use more disk space than the quota limit set for Volume F.

If a single physical disk contains multiple volumes, and you apply quotas to each of the volumes, each volume quota applies only to its specific volume. For example, if you share two different volumes as Volume F and Volume G, quotas are tracked independently for the two volumes, even if they exist on the same physical disk.

If a volume spans multiple physical disks, the same quota for that volume applies to the entire spanned volume. For example, if Volume F has a quota limit of 500 megabytes (MB), then users cannot save more than 500 MB to Volume F, regardless of whether Volume F resides on one physical disk or whether it spans three.

For instructions on enabling disk quotas, see Enable disk quotas.