Volume types for windows 2000 professional

Volume types for windows 2000 professional

There are four editions of Microsoft Windows 2000 released, namely: Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and Datacenter Server. It is an operating system produced by Microsoft that can be used on both server and client computers. This operating system supports 3 types of dynamic disk volumes and they are:

1. Simple volume — a volume with disk space from one disk.
2. Spanned volumes — where up to 32 disks show up as one, increasing it in size but not enhancing performance. When one disk fails, the array is destroyed. Some data may be recoverable. This corresponds to JBOD and not to RAID-1.
3. Striped volumes — also known as RAID-0, store all their data across several disks in stripes. This allows better performance because disk reads and writes are balanced across multiple disks. Like spanned volumes, when one disk in the array fails, the entire array is destroyed [some data may be recoverable].

The server family of Windows 2000 supports fault-tolerant volume types and they are:

1. Mirrored Volumes — the volume contains several disks, and when data is written to one it is also written to the other disks. This means that if one disk fails, the data can be totally recovered from the other disk. Mirrored volumes are also known as RAID-1.
2. RAID-5 volumes — consist of multiple disks, and it uses block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks. Should a disk fail in the array, the parity blocks from the surviving disks are combined mathematically with the data blocks from the surviving disks to reconstruct the data on the failed drive "on-the-fly."