CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

5.10. Getting an A+

This chapter illustrates the importance of hard disk management and the utilities used to perform that management. The following are some key points to remember when managing hard disks:

• A cluster is the allocation unit for a file.

• The cluster size for a partition is based on the file system used and the size of the partition.

• The FAT file system is limited to a maximum partition size of 2GB. FAT32 increased the maximum allowable partition size to 2000GB.

• Windows NT implemented its own file system, called NTFS. NTFS has a number of benefits, some of which are security, auditing, and compression. Windows 2000/XP/2003 use NTFS 5.0, where the Encrypting File System and quotas have been added to the list of reasons you should be using NTFS.

• To optimize your drive, run the defragmentation tool often.

• To verify the integrity of the drive, run Check Disk in Windows XP or Vista often.

• A primary partition is the bootable partition for the system and must be set active. An extended partition holds logical drives for storing information.

• You can remove temporary files with the Disk Cleanup utility in Windows XP or Vista.

• SCSI devices need to have a host adapter and unique IDs, and the SCSI bus must be terminated at both ends.

• SATA drives are much faster than IDE and support hot-swapping.

• RAID 1 is disk mirroring/duplexing.

• RAID 5 stores the data along with parity information.