Introduction

Windows Server 2019 provides a range of features that allows access to a wide variety of storage and storage devices. Windows supports spinning disks, USB memory sticks, and SSD devices (including MVMe SSD devices).

Before a disk can be used, you need to create partitions or volumes on the device, then format the volume. When you first initialize a disk, you need to define which partitioning method to use. You have two choices: Master Boot Record (MBR) or GUID Partition Table (GPT). For a good discussion of the differences between these two mechanisms, see: https://www.howtogeek.com/193669/whats-the-difference-between-gpt-and-mbr-when-partitioning-a-drive/.

With a volume created, you can then format the disk volume. Windows supports five key filesystems you can use: ReFS, NTFS, exFAT, UDF, and FAT32. For details of the latter four, see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/fileio/filesystem-functionality-comparison. The ReFS filesystem is newer and is based on NFTS...