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If you work with storage, you probably already heard about the “4K Sector Drives”, “Advanced Format Drives” and “512e drives”. These new “4K sector drives” abandon the traditional use of 512 bytes per sector in favor of a new structure that uses 4096 bytes...

We just got an updated version of the “iSCSI Initiator Users Guide for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2“ posted on the Microsoft Download Center by Bruce Langworthy, the iSCSI Initiator PM. Here’s a summary of the contents of this 82-page Word document: · Microsoft...

Introduction The File Server team often talks to customers about file server migration and file server consolidation projects. Many times, these are customers running Windows Server 2003 that can point to a number of issues they wanted fixed. In most cases, those issues have been identified and corrected...

A new white paper covering "NTFS CHKDSK Best Practices and Performance" was posted today at microsoft.com/downloads, covering the CHKDSK improvement in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. This was first highlighted in a blog post by Claus Joergensen in the Filecab blog. Claus mentioned: "Today,...

If you’re installing a Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 file server, we always recommend getting the latest hotfixes from Windows Update. That will include all security updates and updates that are considered important enough to be delivered to all Windows Server users. However, there...

SMB Signing Overview Server Message Block (SMB) is the file protocol most commonly used by Windows. SMB Signing is a feature through which communications using SMB can be digitally signed at the packet level. Digitally signing the packets enables the recipient of the packets to confirm their point...

Note: This post is now obsolete. Please refer to this newer post which includes coverage of SMB 3.0: http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2012/06/06/windows-server-2012-which-version-of-the-smb-protocol-smb-1-0-smb-2-0-smb-2-1-or-smb-3-0-you-are-using-on-your-file-server.aspx I recently...

Overview In a previous blog post, I have examined some of PowerShell’s control structures and included an example gathered some information from web. If you haven’t seen it, you can check it at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2010/04/04/experimenting-with-powershell-v2-scripting-variables...

Last week I was testing Visual Studio 2010 to write a C# application to export all my blog posts to a file. I described that in some detail at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2010/03/21/experimenting-with-visual-studio-2010-and-backing-up-the-entries-on-my-blog.aspx I am performing the exact...

1. Overview In a recent blog post, I was looking at PowerShell V2 r emoting in Windows Server 2008 R2. If you haven’t seen it, take a look at http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2010/03/31/experimenting-with-powershell-v2-remoting.aspx . In that post, I mentioned three different ways to gather...

The presentations from SNIA's SDC 2009 are now publicly available for download. This SNIA event happened in Santa Clara, CA last September and the decks are now publicly available, after being restricted to conference attendees for a few months. Out of the dozens of presentations, I wanted to highlight...

A while back, Microsoft announced the release of PowerShell v2 for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008 (see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=151321 ). However, it is not clear to everyone that Powershell v2 is already part of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008...

Version 1.0 of the File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) was announced yesterday during a presentation by Jian Yan and Bartosz Nyczkowski at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The presentation covered a number of details about FSCT and included a demo running FSCT with the HomeFolders...

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 6th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 14th. This event is also co-located with the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 Plugfest. For those working with storage technologies...

I spent some more time experimenting with PowerShell v2 and here goes my second post about it. This time around I am focusing on how to define variables, use expressions and create functions. The "problem" we're solving :-) To make it fun, I decided to create a little script that creates...

Powershell is a command line interface for Windows that offers a very powerful and flexible model. It is now a feature included with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, not an optional download as before. In this post, I show some sample commands that can help you understand some of the basic features...

Earlier this week Microsoft hosted the 2009 edition of the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 2009) in New Orleans. Thousands of partners joined to understand where Microsoft is going and how they can work together with Microsoft. The keynotes were streamed live (a bit too early on the Pacific side, but...

If you are a TechNet Plus or an MSDN subscriber, you can now download the Release Candidate (RC) for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. There are different files for each client architecture (x64, x86) and server architecture (x64, ia64). Additional files include the language packs for each one...

I got a question today: Can you convert an existing MBR disk to GPT? This is about the partitioning style of a disk, with MBR being the older one (limited to 2TB) and GPT being the newer one (going up to 18EB). Keep in mind that the GPT partitioning style is not recognized by all previous versions...

Steve Ballmer announced during his CES keynote the immediate availability of the Windows 7 beta to TechNet Plus and MSDN subscribers. The keynote also included demos of how Windows 7 is faster, more reliable, and makes it easier to do what you want. Steve also mentioned then that an open download of...

Three documents providing some details about Windows Server 2008 R2 have been posted on the microsoft.com website. These documents provide some insight into this upcoming release of Windows Server. A pre-release version was also shared with partners and customers during a few recent public conferences...

An updated list of the 180 sessions planned for the upcoming Microsoft Professional Developers Conference is out, along with additional details about this major conference. Looking at the keywords used by each session, you can clearly see that "Windows 7" is one of the hottest topics this time around...

I was glad to see the first bits of info about the upcoming “Windows 7” product being shared through this new blog by Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky. Jon and Steven are two senior engineering managers for the “Windows 7” team and the blog, called “Engineering Windows 7 blog” or simply “E7”, is located...