Data Storage and Management

Disk Quotas

Windows 2000 supports disk quotas for volumes formatted as NTFS. You can use disk quotas to monitor and limit disk-space use.

Disk quotas are tracked on a per-user, per-volume basis, and users are charged only for the files they own. Quotas are tracked independently for different volumes, even if the volumes are different partitions on the same physical drive. However, if you have shares on the same volume, the quotas assigned to that volume apply to all of these shares collectively, and users' utilization of both shares cannot exceed the assigned quota on that volume.

System administrators can use the Quota tab of the Properties dialog box to perform the following tasks:

Enable or disable disk quotas on a volume.
Prevent users from saving new data when their disk quota is exceeded.
Set the default disk quota warning level and disk quota limit assigned to new volume users.
View disk quota information for each user using the Quota Entries view.

Disk quotas track and control disk space usage for volumes. System administrators can configure Windows 2000 to perform the following tasks:

Prevent further disk space use and log an event when a user exceeds a specified disk space limit.
Log an event when a user exceeds a specified disk space warning level.

When you enable disk quotas, you can set both the disk quota limit and the disk quota warning level. The limit specifies the amount of disk space that is allocated to a user. The warning level specifies when a user is nearing the limit. For example, you can set a user's disk quota limit to 50 megabytes (MB), and the disk quota warning level to 45 MB. The user can store no more than 50 MB of data on the volume, and if more than 45 MB are stored on the volume, you can have the disk quota system log a system event.

When you enable disk quotas for a volume, volume usage is automatically tracked for new users, but existing volume users have no disk quotas applied to them. You can apply disk quotas to existing volume users by adding new quota entries in the Quota Entries window.

For more information about setting disk quotas, see Windows 2000 Server Help.