Data is the most important thing today. With the increasing amount of data everyday, as a System Administrator you should to scale up your hard disks so store everyone’s data in it. There will be time when you’ll have to add new hard disks in your server to meet the new requirements.
Adding new hard disks in your new computer is very easy. Connect them and your machine will recognize and let you view the files in it. However if you do the same in Windows Server, you won’t see anything new in My Computer. That is because you need to initialize first and then format them. Only then you can use the new hard-disks.
So lets see how to add new hard disks in Server 2012.
First we need to add new hard disks in the Virtual Box since we are running this server on Virtual box.
- Go to Settings –> Storage. Here you’ll see the existing hard-disk.
Create new disk
- Below the storage tree box, click on the first icon and select ‘Add Hard Disk‘.
Add new hard disk
- Select ‘Create new disk‘.
Create new disk
- Select your file type of virtual hard disk.
Select your file type
- Select ‘Dynamically Allocated‘. If you select ‘Fixed size‘, it will take up all the space of the destination in which you’re going to save this vhd.
Dynamically stored
- Enter the hard disk name and size. Click on ‘Create‘.
Enter name and size
Enter name and size
- The new hard disk we just created is now visible in storage. You can also add new hard disk by Right-Clicking on ‘Controller: SATA’ and select ‘Add hard disk’.
Right-click –> Add new hard disk
- Two new hard disks are now present in Windows Server 2012.
Two new hard disks
Now lets see if Server can directly add the hard disk or we have to manually initiate them first.
- In Server, you can only see your previous hard disks, not the two hard disks we just added.
No new drives
- Go to Server Manager Dashboard –> Tools –> Computer Management. Or you can directly search for ‘Computer Management‘ in ‘Start Search’ and select ‘Settings‘.
Tools –> Computer management
- As soon as Computer Management opens up, you’ll see a pop up windows informing you to initialize the new hard disks we have just added.
Select the 2 hard disks and select GPT Partition.
MBR partition can only handle data upto 2 TB. So if you add a 4 TB hard disk you’ll see only 2 TB of space.
GPT Partition Table can recognize and work with any amount of space in hard disk. The only problem is older versions can’t recognize this.
Initialize disk
- You can now see the two new disks. But these are still unallocated space. That is Server knows it has two additional disks but doesn’t know what to do with it. So we should create New Volume.
Right-click on it and select ‘New Spanned Volume’.
If you select ‘Simple Volume’ you;ll have two different drives. In Spanned volume, if one disk is full the Processor starts writing the next data on the next data. So it is as if the server has one large hard disk.
Right-Click –> New Spanned volume
- Click on Next.
Click Next
Since we are creating Spanned Volume, we need to select multiple disks to create a single one. Select the other disk. and click on Add.
Select disk –> Ad
Assign a letter and click on Next.
Click on next
Assign Drive letter and Name.
Assign drive letter, name.
Keep the File System as NTFS, enter a name for the disk and select ‘Perform quick format‘.
Format the disks
Click Finish.
Click Finish
- Create Dynamic disk, since our operating System is already present in C: drive.
Create dynamic disks
- You’ll now see only one disk, which has both the disks in it. This is a Spanned disk.
Two disks combined in one spanned disk
- If you want you can also shrink an existing disk to create a new partition. Just right-click and select ‘Shrink Volume‘.
Right-click –> Shrink volume
- Enter the volume of new partition you want to create.
Enter the size of new partition
- New partition will also be ‘Unallocated’ space.
New partition
- If you want, you can extend a volume. Right-click –> Extend volume. Remember, you can only extend a current volume if you have UNALLOCATED space. IF you already have a disk, you cannot use that space to extend any partition.
Right-click –> Extend
- The unallocated space will be selected by default. Click on Next.
Select unallocated space
- The new extended volume is now ready to use.
Disk has been extended as before.
