Hard Disk Specifications and Interfaces
Hello and welcome to Pluralsight. My name's Mike Pfeiffer, I'll be your instructor for this course on Storage for the CompTIA Server+ exam. In this course we're going to cover the objectives for the storage portion of the CompTIA Server+ exam, and we're going to start off in this first module by talking about hard disk specifications and interfaces. To get started we'll talk a little bit about how hard drives actually work, and we'll talk about the dimensions, form factors, and capacity requirements that you need to be aware of. We'll move on to hard disk interfaces and we'll talk about the connector types that you can use to plug hard drives into your servers. And here we'll cover common interface types like SAS, SATA, and USB and even more. Next we'll talk about some disk specifications like RPM and IOPS, and these factors will actually dictate how fast your disks can actually go. And along with that we'll take a look at seek time and latency and how that can impact performance. And finally we'll wrap things up by talking about the difference between traditional hard drives versus solid state drives, or SSDs.

Configuring RAID
In this module we're going to take a look at Configuring RAID, which will allow us to create redundancy for our hard disk drives and also boost the performance of our storage systems in our servers. First we're going to go through all of the common RAID levels, the ones that you'll use in the field when you're working on servers, and also the ones that you need to know for the Server+ exam. We'll talk about the ability to hot swap disks, pull disks, and insert disks into running systems without having to shut them down, and also the concept of spare disks and how those work in a highly available environment. We'll talk about the differences between software and hardware-based RAID. And finally, we'll wrap up by talking about array controllers, which are the physical hardware controller that makes hardware RAID possible.

Exploring Storage Technologies
In this module we're going to be exploring various storage technologies, and we're going to be building on top of everything that we've learned so far. First, we're going to talk about direct attached storage, and this will use standard interfaces that we talked about previously to connect hard drives to servers or workstations. Next we'll take a look at network attached storage, and this will use the same disks and hard drives that we talked about previously in the course, but we'll look at how we can access them over the network instead. Next, we'll move onto storage area networks, which are common in large server environments or data centers. Then we'll talk about an approach called just a bunch of disks, or JBOD, and this is basically just like it sounds, we're really just using a pool of disks without any redundancy here. And then we'll wrap up with a few details of what you need to know about tapes, optical drives, and flash and USB drives.

Storage Capacity and Considerations
In this module, we're going to talk about planning for storage in your environment and we're going to focus on storage capacity and considerations. First we'll talk about understanding storage calculation and the reason this is important is because hard drive manufacturers use a different way of calculating free space than operating system vendors typically do. So, we'll take a look at that and how that works. Next up, we'll take a look at disk quotas and this is a great way for you to prevent users from filling up all the storage space that you have on your file servers. We'll also take a quick look at disk compression, how you can save some space using compression algorithms and tools that are built into the operating system and third party utilities. And then we'll talk about some capacity planning considerations for things like operating systems, database servers, file servers and application servers.