Managing Disks Quiz

This quiz covers the the training module “Managing Disks”. This module contains eight lessons. Here is a summary of the previous lessons. This first lesson is “Partitions and Volumes“. The second lesson is “Converting to Dynamic Disks”. The third lesson is “File Systems”. The forth lesson is “Volume Sets”. The fifth lesson is “Spanned Volumes”.…

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RAID-5 Volumes

RAID 5 Volumes are similar to striped volumes. However, as well as striping the information across 3 disks it also creates parity information, which can be used to recover lost data in the event of a disk failure. Therefore this system is fault-tolerant. Use the buttons below to navigate through the lesson You can use…

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Mirrored Volumes

Mirrored Volumes store exactly the same information on each drive, making the information on the second drive available for fault tolerance. Mirrored Volumes are supported by Windows Server 2003 but not Windows XP.  When files are written to the disk they are written to both disks at the same time.  It is beneficial to place…

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Striped Volumes

Striped Volumes are similar to spanned in that they use the space available on both disks and appear to the user as one single volume.  There can be 2-32 disks in a striped set.  Striped Volumes are supported in both Windows XP Professional and Windows Server 2003. Use the buttons below to navigate through the…

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Spanned Volumes

Spanned Volumes can make use of any unused drive space on separate drives.  Spanned Volumes are not fault tolerant. If one of the disks were to fail the entire volume would be lost with the data along with it.  There can be up to 32 disks in a spanned volume. Spanned Volumes are supported in…

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Volume Sets

Fault-Tolerance/Redundancy of data and high speed data access are essential requirements in many of today’s businesses.  Using dynamic disks in Windows 2003 enables the use of Volume Sets. A volume consists of a part or parts of one or more physical disks grouped in either a simple, spanned, mirrored, striped, or RAID-5 configuration. Use the…

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File Systems

Once a partition/volume has been created, it then needs to be formatted with a File System. A File System organises and allows for the retrieval of the data stored on the disk.  This mechanism is similar to how office file systems operate. Files are stored in folders and then indexed so that they can be…

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Converting to Dynamic Disks

In order to use a dynamic volume on a Windows XP/2003 system the original basic disk will need to be converted to a dynamic disk.  Existing basic partitions on the disk will be upgraded to volumes, however upgraded volumes may not then be extended.  To convert a disk to dynamic there must be at least…

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Partitions and Volumes

Hard Disks perform a very simple function – to store data and then reliably retrieve it on command. However, before any information can be stored on a hard disk it must be both partitioned and formatted with a file system. A hard disk can contain multiple partitions and file-systems. As you will learn later this…

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