Ask the Windows 2000 Dev Team
Every other week we put your How-Come-You-Did-That questions to the Windows 2000 development team. Submit your questions here.
Uniform Disk Quotas, Shutting Down to Reconfigure, Support for Removable Storage
Q: I heard about the disk quotas being available in Windows 2000. Do I have to give everyone the same amount of space?
A: No, you can customize the disk-space quota on a per-user basis for each NTFS volume.
You have several ways to react when users go over their disk-quota limits: At the first level of response, Windows 2000 logs the occurrence to the Event Log and takes no other action. At the second level, Windows 2000 logs an event when users exceed their disk-quota warning level (a number you can set). Finally, you can have Windows 2000 deny access to users who have exceeded their limit. They will be unable to store any more files until they delete others from the server or until their quota limit is increased.
Q: I don't mind buying more hard-drive space for users; it's fairly cheap, but it's tiresome to manage. For example, do I have to shut down a server to allocate space across one or more drives?
A: Fortunately, the dynamic volume management in Windows 2000 means fewer reboots for many tasks, including allocating space on a volume.
When you format the hard drives, format them as NTFS drives, and as dynamic disks rather than basic disks. You can choose from simple, striped, mirrored, spanned, or RAID-5 volumes using a wizard found in the Disk Management tool in the Computer Management console. With dynamic disks, you are no longer restricted to four volumes per disk. You can also add a new disk without restarting. Most configuration changes take effect almost immediately.
Q: What about support for tape storage or removable media?
A: You can use Removable Storage to track your removable storage media (tapes and optical discs) and to manage the hardware libraries — such as changers and jukeboxes — that contain them. Removable Storage labels, catalogs, and tracks media; it controls library drives, slots, and doors, and provides drive-cleaning operations.
There's also Remote Storage support in Windows 2000, which uses criteria you specify to automatically copy little-used files to removable media. If hard-disk space drops below specified levels, Remote Storage removes the cached file content from the disk. If the file is needed later, the content is automatically recalled from storage. Remote Storage also monitors the amount of space available on your local volumes.