What This Book Is

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So, rather than try to compete with some of the most brilliant minds in the field, in this book I instead decided to cover areas that appear neglected in modern texts. This work, therefore, stays focused on disks and disk management, particularly with regard to servers. What are the basic elements of a disk and various disk architectures? How do you manage the disks you have or plan to have? How do you keep them running well with a minimum of fuss? The book also discusses such key areas as:

Windows file systems and operating systems
Backup
Disaster recovery
Basics of disk management on Windows 2000

Perhaps even more importantly, though, it takes up areas that are paid scant attention among the books available on the market — vital areas such as:

Disk quotas
Fragmentation
Optimization
Hard drive reliability
Asset management and software deployment
Forensics

Vital areas, yet they are given a page or two at best in current literature. This book fills this gap with chapters addressing each of these areas, written in such a way as to tie them all together as essential ingredients of sound disk management.

In addition, I have pulled together a couple of more speculative chapters towards the end, going over disk and disk management trends that are likely to affect Windows-based systems in the near future. In addition to attempting to predict where hard drives themselves are headed, the book looks at the future for storage and how storage issues will affect those managing the ever-increasing number of disks at work in the modern enterprise, as well as taking a look at where the Windows platform is going with a chapter on .NET and 64-bit computing. Also included is a discussion of what Microsoft plans for the next few years on the server and desktop side.

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