Traditional volumes consist of a fixed amount of physical space on one or more server disks. A NetWare server supports up to 255 volumes of any combination of Traditional and NSS volumes, plus the system volume.
During installation of NetWare, your system volume is automatically created as an NSS volume. After installation, you can use Novell Remote Manager for NetWare to create a new Traditional volume on any disk that has a NetWare partition. For information, see the NW 6.5 SP8: Novell Remote Manager Administration Guide.
You subdivide Traditional volumes in two ways:
Physically: Traditional volumes consist of physical partitions called volume segments. If a Traditional volume contains multiple volume segments, its member segments can reside on multiple server disks. For information about volume segments, see Section 1.2, Traditional Volume Segments.
Logically:
You divide volumes into directories. In turn, the directories contain files and subdirectories created by network supervisors and users who have the appropriate rights. For information about directories and subdirectories, see Understanding Directory Structures for the NSS and NetWare Traditional File Systems
the NW 6.5 SP8: File Systems Management Guide.
When you boot a NetWare server, each Traditional volume is mounted, meaning the following:
The volume becomes visible to the operating system.
The volume’s File Allocation Table (FAT) is loaded into memory.
A single block of data in the file takes up one entry in the FAT. Because of this, volumes with a smaller block size require more server memory to mount and manage, and it takes longer to mount the volume. However, if most of your files are small, a large block size wastes disk space.
The volume’s directory entry table (DET) is loaded into the server memory.
As the Traditional volume is mounted, the FAT and DET fill cache buffers in the server memory. The more files and directories in the volume, the longer it takes to mount. If a Traditional volume fails to mount, it might be because you have run out of server memory.
In Novell eDirectory™, each Traditional volume is represented by a Volume object. Volume objects are leaf objects that represent a physical volume or logical volume on the network.
The Volume object’s properties contains the following information:
The NetWare server the physical volume resides on
The volume name recorded when the volume was initialized on the server (for example, sys:)
The volume’s owner
Space use restrictions for users
A description of the volume’s use
Statistical information on disk space availability, block size, directory entries, name space support, and so on.