Allocating raw disk space on Windows

You can configure raw disk space on Windows as a logical drive or physical drive.

About this task

To find the drive letter or disk number, run the Disk Administrator. If the drives must be striped (multiple physical disks combined into one logical disk), only logical drive specification would work.

You must be a member of the Informix-Admin group when you create a storage space or add a chunk. The raw disk space can be formatted or unformatted disk space.

Important: If you allocate a formatted drive or disk partition as raw disk space and it contains data, the database server overwrites the data when it begins to use the disk space. You must ensure that any data on raw disk space is expendable before you allocate the disk space to the database server.

To specify a logical drive:

Procedure

  1. Assign a drive letter to the disk partition.
  2. Specify the following value for ROOTDBS in the onconfig file: \\.\drive_letter
  3. To create a storage space or add a chunk, specify the logical drive partition.
    This example adds a chunk of 5000 KB on the e: drive, at an offset of 5200 KB, to dbspace dpspc3.
    onspaces -a dbspc3 \\.\e: -o 5200 -s 5000

Results

To specify a physical drive

  1. If the disk partition has not been assigned a drive letter, specify the following value for ROOTDBS in the onconfig file: \\.\PhysicalDrive<number>
  2. To create a storage space or add a chunk, specify the physical drive partition.

    This example adds a chunk of 5000 KB on PhysicalDrive0, at an offset of 5200 KB, to dbspace dpspc3.

    onspaces -a dbspc3 \\.\PhysicalDrive0 : -o 5200 -s 5000