The best time to establish a drive and partition strategy occurs when building the Windows application server and configuring its Direct-Attached Storage (DAS). How many drives? How many partitions on each drive? Decide at build-time to avoid spending time and money on repartitioning after deployment.
Partitioning Benefits
Where possible, Info-Tech recommends moving from partitioned DAS drives to either a local RAID array or a Storage Area Network (SAN) to store data and from which to boot the OS and apps. However, many servers still rely on DAS. A good drive and partitioning strategy will make the best of this situation.
While a single-drive, whole-disk partition setup is easy, multiple drives with multiple disk partitions may better meet IT, business, and application needs. Installing multiple drives and dividing up the available disk space into partitions can effectively enable:
- Multi-boot for testing/development environments.
By providing separate partitions into which different operating systems (OSs) can be installed without interfering with each other.
- Separating system files from data files.
Allows recovery of a failed OS without affecting data and faster defragmentation...
