Windows 2000 supports a variety of DVD drives from a variety of different vendors. These devices (as with all hardware) should appear on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) in order to guarantee support. DVD drives and their properties are configured from Device Manager under DVD/CD-ROM devices. If the device is not automatically configured via Plug and Play, you can use the Add / Remove Hardware wizard to manually install the device.
Windows 2000 also supports removable media, such as tape devices. Again, these should appear on the HCL and will be detected and configured automatically if Plug and Play compliant. If not, again use the Add / Remove Hardware wizard to install manually. Note that unlike NT 4, the Backup program in Windows 2000 supports backing up to different media such as disk, CDR/W, Zip drives, and so forth, with the ability to span media.
Disk Quotas
Another new feature in Windows 2000 is the ability to use disk quotas. Disk quotas allow an Administrator to be able to track how much disk space a particular user is using, and decide on an appropriate course of action. The important stuff about disk quotas:
- Can only be set up on NTFS partitions / volumes.
- Configured on a partition-by-partition basis. That is, you could have quotas configured on drive C, and not D, for example.
- Quotas do not use NTFS compression in calculations – space is calculated based on uncompressed size of files.
- Quotas report only the amount of disk space available to user to programs.
- Quotas can be used for track ing space usage and/or denying space usage to those who go over the configured limit
When quotas are configured, they are configured for everyone saving files to that volume. If you wanted to configure special settings for a given user or users on that volume, you could use a Quota Entry, which would specify settings for that particular user. Note that quota entries can only be configured for users, and not groups. As such, you couldn’t set up an entry for the entire Sales group. If you needed special settings for this group, each user would need to be configured individually. For this reason, it is recommended that you try and have all users will similar needs save their files to the same partition. That way, you can configure all quota settings at once, and avoid quota entries for all but special cases. This screen shot shows both the Quota tab for a partition, as well as a quota entry for a particular user.
