Desktop Disks

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It is important to note, though, that these trends are not limited to just the server market. A friend still uses my old desktop from five years ago, complete with its 500-MB drive, and it works just fine for what she uses it for — e-mail and word processing. These days, though, some desktop drives can exceed 100 GB, and multiple drives are becoming more and more common, so what is the upshot of this hard drive explosion? Manufacturing quality is hard pressed to keep up with the explosion in the sheer number of hard disks deployed and the quantity of data they hold. A recent white paper from a hard drive vendor was frank enough to say that the increase in the number of drives has resulted in a dilution of overall system reliability. It goes on to state that given the growth in disk sizes, each potential drive failure now puts more data at risk. So, ensuring the reliability of each drive has become more important than ever.

Neglect disks and disk management, then, at your peril. In today's disk-intensive world, it is vital for organizations to take care of the basics of managing space quotas, monitoring disk performance, organizing disks and partitions properly, planning for future storage needs, taking care of backups, having an adequate Disaster Recovery Plan, and keeping disk I/O low by keeping volumes free of fragmentation. And that is what this book is all about. It will not turn you into an expert in every aspect and activity of disk management or hardware maintenance, but it will certainly give you a good overview of the subject and enough familiarity to make more qualified decisions when it comes to the overall health of your server disks and how you should best go about managing them.

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