MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-270): Installing ...

Lesson 3: Managing Disk Quotas
Lesson 3 Managing Disk Quotas
10-39
You use disk quotas to manage storage growth in distributed environments. Disk quotas
allow you to allocate disk space to users based on the files and folders that they
own. You can set disk quotas, quota thresholds, and quota limits for all users and for
individual users. You can also monitor the amount of hard disk space that users have
used and the amount that they have left against their quota.
After this lesson, you will be able to
■ Describe the purpose of disk quotas
■ Set disk quotas for users
■ Determine the status of disk quotas
■ Monitor disk quotas
■ Identify guidelines for using disk quotas
Estimated lesson time: 30 minutes
Overview of Disk Quotas
Windows XP Professional tracks disk quotas and controls disk usage on a per-user, pervolume
basis. Windows XP Professional tracks disk quotas for each volume, even if the
volumes are on the same hard disk. Because quotas are tracked on a per-user basis,
every user’s disk space is tracked regardless of the folder in which the user stores files.
Disk quotas can be applied only to Windows XP Professional NTFS volumes.
Table 10-2 describes the characteristics of Windows XP Professional disk quotas.
Table 10-2 Disk Quota Characteristics and Descriptions
Characteristic Description
Disk usage is based on
file and folder ownership.
Disk quotas do not use
compression.
Free space for applications
is based on quota limit.
Windows XP Professional calculates disk space usage for users
based on the files and folders that they own. When a user copies
or saves a new file to an NTFS volume or takes ownership of a
file on an NTFS volume, Windows XP Professional charges the
disk space for the file against the user’s quota limit.
Windows XP Professional ignores compression when it calculates
hard disk space usage. Users are charged for each uncompressed
byte, regardless of how much hard disk space is actually used.
This is done partially because file compression produces different
degrees of compression for different types of files. Different
uncompressed file types that are the same size might end up
being very different sizes when they are compressed.
When you enable disk quotas, the free space that Windows XP
Professional reports to applications for the volume is the amount
of space remaining within the user’s disk quota limit.