Understanding Disk Management Terminology

The Windows Vista version of Disk Management has simplified somewhat the arcane language of disk administration. Nevertheless, it’s still important to have a bit of the vocabulary under your belt. The following terms and concepts are the most important.

  • Volume. A volume is a disk or subdivision of a disk that is formatted and available for storage. If a volume is assigned a drive letter, as volumes generally are, it appears as a separate entity in Windows Explorer. (See the following paragraph for a type of volume that is not assigned a drive letter.) A hard disk may have one, several, or many volumes.

  • Mounted drive. A mounted drive is a volume that is mapped to an empty folder on an NTFS-formatted disk. ...

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