Adding New Disks

Thanks to hot swapping and Plug and Play technologies-both supported by Windows Server 2008-the process of adding new disks has changed considerably from the days of Windows NT 4.0. If a computer supports hot swapping of disks, you can install new disks without having to shut down the computer. Simply insert the hard disk drives you want to use. If the computer doesn't support hot swapping, you will need to shut down the computer, insert the drives, and restart the computer.

Either way, after you insert the drives you want to use, log on and access Disk Management in the Computer Management tool. If the new drives have already been initialized, meaning they have disk signatures, they should be brought online automatically when you select Rescan Disks from the Action menu. If you are working with new drives that haven't been initialized, meaning they lack a disk signature, when you choose to initialize the new disk, Windows Server 2008 will start the Initialize Disk Wizard. This wizard will allow you to choose either the MBR or GPT partitioning style.

You can use Disk Management to initialize a new disk as well. In the Disk List view, the disk will be marked with a red down arrow icon, and the disk's status will be listed as Not Initialized. You can then right-click the disk's icon and select Initialize Disk.

When the Initialize Disk Wizard starts, follow these steps to configure the disks:

1. Click Next to get to the Select Disks To Initialize page. The disks you added are selected for initialization automatically, but if you don't want to initialize a particular disk, you can clear the related check box.
2. Select either the MBR or GPT partitioning style.
3. When the wizard finishes, the disk is ready for partitioning and formatting.

Windows Server 2008 can use disk write caching

As discussed previously, storage performance is primarily a factor of a disk's access time (how long it takes to register a request and scan the disk), seek time (how long it takes to find the requested data), and transfer rate (how long it takes to read and write data). By enabling disk write caching, you could reduce the number of times the operating system accesses the disk by caching disk writes and then performing several writes at once. In this way, disk performance is primarily infl uenced by seek time and transfer rate.

The drawback of disk write caching is that in the event of a power or system failure the cached writes might not be written to disk, and this can result in data loss. Windows Server 2008 disables disk write caching by default, but you can enable it on a per-disk basis as long as write caching is supported by your hardware. Keep in mind that some server applications require disk write caching to be enabled or disabled, and if these applications use a particular set of disks, these disks must use the required setting for disk write caching.

To configure disk write caching, start Computer Management, expand the System Tools node, and select Device Manager. In the details pane, expand Disk Drives, right-click the disk drive you want to work with, and then select Properties. In the Device Properties dialog box, select the Policies tab. Select or clear Enable Write Caching On The Disk as appropriate, and click OK.