Adding Disks to the Storage Pool

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Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

The storage pool is a set of disks on which the System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 server stores replicas and recovery points for protected data. Before you can start protecting data, you must add at least one disk to the storage pool. After configuration, you can add more disks to the storage pool.

Note

DPM does not support USB/1394 disks.

Adding a disk to the storage pool is not a requirement if you are going to use custom volumes to protect your data sources, or if you are only going to use disk-to-tape protection.

For more information and guidelines for choosing disk types and calculating capacity requirements for your storage pool, see Planning the Storage Pool (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=196873).

To help you estimate your storage space needs, download the Storage Calculators for System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=187611).

DPM requires a disk that is dedicated to the storage pool and a disk that is dedicated to the following:

  • System files

  • DPM installation files

  • DPM prerequisite software

  • DPM database files

You can install DPM on the same volume that the operating system is installed on or on a different volume that does not include the operating system. However, a disk on which you install DPM cannot be added to the storage pool.

Note

When you add a disk to the storage pool, DPM uses the available free space on the disk and does not delete any data that is already on the disk. If there are existing volumes on the disk that have free space, DPM cannot use that space for the storage pool. DPM can use only space in the volumes that it creates. If you want to make the entire disk space available to the storage pool, you must delete any existing volumes on the disk before adding it to the storage pool.

To add disks to the storage pool

  1. In DPM Administrator Console, on the navigation bar, click Management, and then click the Disks tab.

  2. In the Actions pane, click Add.

    The Add Disks to Storage Pool dialog box appears. The Available disks section lists the disks that you can add to the storage pool.

  3. Select one or more disks, click Add, and then click OK.