

This creates fatigue in the working parts and reduces the estimated lifetime of the drive. Spinning disks have one critical problem - they spin. For just sheer raw space, it’s really hard to argue with this technology - but there are limitations.īoth individual storage systems and large storage arrays have been steadily moving away from spinning disk and into solid-state drives for benefits in both data access speed and longevity. If we fast-forward to today, a quick search found a 12-terabyte (that’s 12,000,000 megabytes) spinning hard disk available for $175 USD. For instance, if we look at historical prices for hard disk storage, a 26-megabyte spinning hard disk in 1980 cost $5,000 USD. In fact, the amount of storage a single person can have in a regular desktop system now could have been considered inconceivable more than, say, 10-15 years ago. Spinning disk storage (standard hard disk drives) are CHEAP - incredibly so, considering where we were not very long ago. In some cases this is a very valid question. Sometimes this can mean a single physical drive like the C: drive on an individual workstation, right on up to permissions for an entire group on network-attached storage. For the purposes of Windows 10, we’re going to focus solely on the space-based limits as that is what they focus on significantly more.ĭisk quotas in the context of Windows 10, and by extension Windows Server, revolve around assigning users and user groups limits to how much space they can use in a given storage area. File-based limits the number of files that a user can create, while space-based limits the amount of disk space a user can use to store data. The first thing we need to clarify is our terminology, because there are actually two different types of disk quotas: file-based and space-based. Sometimes it’s possible to get away with just asking someone “hey, can you try to keep your used space below this amount, please?” Other times, though, they can completely surpass that amount without even trying, just due to the way that data grows. To manage this, everyone is given a particular amount of space assigned to them - sometimes more, sometimes less depending on need. Disk quotas are very much like this scenario: multiple people sharing the storage with a maximum amount of total storage available.
