Chapter 10. Storage Management

Storage management defines the way that an operating system interfaces with nonvolatile storage devices and media. The term storage encompasses many different devices, including tape drives, optical media, CD jukeboxes, floppy diskettes, local hard disks, and storage area networks (SANs). Microsoft Windows provides specialized support for each of these classes of storage media. Because our focus in this book is on the kernel components of Windows, in this chapter we'll concentrate on just the fundamentals of the hard-disk storage subsystem in Windows. Significant portions of the Windows support for removable media and remote storage (offline archiving) are implemented in user mode.

In this chapter, we'll examine how kernel-mode device drivers interface file system drivers to disk media, discuss how disks are partitioned, describe the way volume managers abstract and manage volumes, and present the implementation of multipartition disk-management features in Windows, including replicating and dividing file system data across physical disks for reliability and for performance enhancement. We conclude by describing how file system drivers mount volumes they are responsible for managing.