Windows Server 2008: The Definitive Guide

Disk-Based Quotas

Windows 2000 first introduced the disk-based quota feature, allowing an administrator to define a limit or set of limits on the consumption of disk space by individual users. Windows Server 2008's quota management features some interesting properties:

• Windows Server 2008 can distinguish between volumes, so you can set different quotas on different volumes to perhaps segregate types of data, or to offer a disk exclusively to a set of users for their daily work.

• You can assign disk-based quotas on mapped drives as long as the physical volumes to which the mapped drives point were created with Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003 or were upgraded to either of the later versions from Windows NT 4.0.

• Unlike some third-party software programs, Windows Server 2008 does not allow grace writes. That is, some software allows a user to continue an operation—say, a file copy process—even if during the middle of that operation the disk-based quota is reached. Windows Server 2008 does not allow this; it will cut off the operation when the quota is reached.

As usual, though, neat features always contain weak points. First, quotas are supported only on disks formatted with the NTFS filesystem. This isn't too surprising because most progressive filesystem features aren't available under the various flavors of FAT. Second and perhaps more disturbing is that, due to an architectural limitation, disk-based quotas (those assigned on the volume level, that is) can be added only to ...