6. Creating a Striped Volume
One
of the procedures you can perform with Disk Management is to create a
striped volume. Creating such a volume is often desirable simply because
of the ease of administration and the substantial gain in speed. To
create a striped volume, you must have more than one disk.
When you’re creating a striped volume, you are
creating partitions of the same size across two or more disks. Bear this
point in mind as you plan your implementation because you need to have
the same amount of space available on each disk that you want to use for
your set.
To create a striped volume, follow these steps:
1. | Right-click
one of the disks to be used in the striped volume set, and select New
Striped Volume. The New Striped Volume Wizard starts. Click Next.
Note Notice that the wizard
automatically sets the size for all selected disks to the largest amount
of free space that is equally available on each disk. |
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2. | Select
the disks you want to include as part of a striped volume. The wizard
automatically selects the first free disk as the first in the striped
volume. You can select the remaining disk(s) from the left column and
add them to the right column for the set. When you are done adding
disks, click Next.
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3. | You are prompted to assign a drive letter or drive path for the new striped set. Choose from the following three options:
- Assign the Following Drive Letter—
This option assigns your set one drive letter, as with any normal
drive. Selecting this option is the most common method of mounting a
striped set, and it suffices for most purposes.
- Mount in the Following Empty NTFS Folder—
By mounting a striped set to a folder, you are effectively creating a
mount point within another disk. The mount point isn’t actually on
another disk, in the physical sense. The folder you use just has the
amount of storage equal to the size of your striped set. This approach
is more closely related to the UNIX approach, in which the actual drive
letter is not used but the folder is referred to as the mount point.
- Do Not Assign a Drive Letter or Drive Path—
This option creates the striped set and leaves it for you to allocate
later, using either of the two methods mentioned previously.
Note In Windows Explorer,
notice that the icon for the folder mount point shows up as a hard disk.
This icon appears simply so that you can differentiate between a
mounted folder and a plain folder. |
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4. | Click Next.
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5. | Select the volume format options and click Next.
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6. | When
you are presented with a summary of the actions to be performed by the
wizard, click the Finish button so your new striped volume will be
created and mounted under the path you chose in step 3.
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When a basic disk is made a member of a mirror,
stripe, or RAID set, it’s marked (or “signed”) with a tiny, hidden
partition at the end of the disk drive. This partition tells Windows
that the disk is a member of a fault-tolerant disk set. The information
about the configuration itself—for example, whether a given disk is the
primary or secondary disk in a mirror set—is stored in the Registry. If
you think about it, you can see that this is not a great place to store
this kind of information: If a disk is damaged, Windows might not be
capable of reading the Registry to find the configuration information.
That’s why you were always exhorted to update your Emergency Boot Disks
when you made changes in the old Windows NT Disk Management; the disk
configuration was stored on the emergency disks, too.
For dynamic disks, Windows creates a 4MB
partition at the end of each disk drive in which it stores all the
configuration information for all the dynamic drives in your computer.
This redundant information helps Windows reconstruct a picture of the
whole system if any drives are damaged or replaced, and it’s another
good reason to use dynamic disks over basic ones when you’re building a
Windows 7 system.
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7. Creating and Attaching VHDs
New
to Windows 7 is the capability to create and attach (or mount) virtual
hard disks (VHDs) and treat them like a removable disk without the need
to use virtualization software such as Microsoft Virtual Server or
Virtual PC. A VHD is a type of file that contains everything a physical
drive offers—file system, structure, and so on. You can load nearly any
type of operating system into a virtual disk, and load multiple virtual
disks on a single physical host. Virtual disks can help you save money
and effort as an alternative to installing multiple hardware drives in a
computer. Regardless of the ability to create and use VHDs directly in
Windows 7, you can also run Virtual PC if you want.
Creating a VHD
To create a VHD in Windows 7, follow these steps:
1. | Open the Disk Management window.
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2. | Click the Action menu item, and click Create VHD. The Create and Attach Virtual Hard Disk dialog box opens.
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3. | Click Browse and navigate to the folder that will hold your VHD file.
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4. | Enter a name for the VHD in the File Name text box, and then click Save.
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5. | You
can control the size of the VHD by entering a maximum size in the
Virtual Hard Disk Size box and selecting MB, GB, or TB from the
drop-down list.
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6. | Finally, you can select the size of the virtual disk, either fixed (default) or dynamically expanding (see Figure 5).
A fixed size VHD file doesn’t increase or decrease in size regardless
of the data it holds. A dynamically expanding VHD file starts small and
grows as the amount of the data it holds increases, but only to the
maximum specified size.
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7. | When you’re finished, click OK. Your VHD file is created.
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To initialize your new VHD, follow these steps:
1. | Right-click the new unallocated VHD disk number (on the left) in the Disk Management utility and select Initialize Disk.
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2. | In
the Initialize Disk dialog box, select a partition style—MBR (Master
Boot Record) or GPT (GUID Partition Table). Use the GPT partition style
if your disk is larger than 2TB or is on an Itanium-based computer, but
be aware that this partition might not work with all previous Windows
versions.
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3. | Click OK.
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4. | To
create a volume, right-click the new unallocated disk (with the hatched
background) in Disk Management and select New Simple Volume.
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5. | The
New Simple Volume Wizard starts and walks you through volume creation,
including the selection of the file system (NTFS or FAT32). When you’re
finished, the new VHD is attached and ready for use.
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Attaching an Existing VHD
To attach an existing VHD, such as a demo VHD file you download from the Microsoft Download Center, follow these steps:
1. | Select Action, Attach VHD. The Attach Virtual Hard Disk dialog box prompts you for the location of the VHD file.
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2. | Locate the file and highlight it.
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3. | Click Open, and then click OK. |
