Hard-drive formatting is a question of file efficiency: the determining factors are; size of hdd, size of individual files and to some degree speed of file transfers… the basic server function eg, file storage, wsus, time sync etc is largely irrelevant at this state.
Step 1.
When the server detects a new drive it will ask you what to initialise it as and your two basic options are mbr and gpt;
Mbr is the old format and today that is basically only useful for an ide type drive (
100g or less) or if the data has to be backwards compatible eg, you have older servers running XP or earlier systems and some of that data being stored on them is 16bit programs.
Gpt is the current standard and can support hard-drives that are physically larger than 2 terabits as well as single file sizes larger than 2 g eg most movies files wouldn't fit on a fat32 drive even if the drive has enough blank space.
Step 2.
Simple volume is the internal file format and simple volume is the best option for most people unless the drive will host multiple operating systems or such as some of the more complex 'page file' scenarios.
I had come accross, format my 4x 3TB ext. drive to parity space.
You want a gpt and simple volume for these drives.
Off topic; server 12r2 comes in two basic flavours: standard and Database… they are both the same server in almost every respect except for the licence. A standard server follows the basic Microsoft pattern of one machine = one operating system or put another way, you need a new licence for each individual server. The data base server is designed for modern business scenarios where the company purchases one (
more often two for redundancy) physical server boxes with multiple cpu/ hard-drives and networks then installs 2 dozen Virtual server12r2 copies onto it… the advantages of V-servers are many:
• Each department can have its own server identical (
still separate) to each other and they can load what-ever software they need personally without worrying about corrupting services used by other departments or risking down time on their own servers… in event of virus or other disasters they just roll the server back to yesterday or wipe it completely and start again with a new template server copy from the main system… a complete 100 g v-server with all the rolls, accounts and Microsoft updates can be copy-pasted in and ready for use in under 10 minutes.
• Backup becomes a stress-less exercise with entire servers being replicated across multiple hard-drives (
network locations) or uploaded into a cloud… in todays server boxes this can be done without need to turn off the server or "run slow"… with enough resources the back-up and recovery procedures become invisible to the end users.
