Toshiba Magnia 560S - Manual (Page 207)

Location and Enabling
Virtual Sizing and Online Capacity Expansion
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Virtual Sizing and Online
Capacity Expansion
Virtual sizing is a unique Power Console Plus feature. With virtual sizing, the
Administrator can use the disk space of a hard drive that was just added to an existing
disk array, without rebooting the operating system.
Virtual sizing supports Windows 2000 (only supported for Basic Disk).
Location and Enabling
The Virtual Sizing option is found in the Boot Up Configuration Manager. This option
is in the Objects menu, under Logical Drive and View/Update Configuration. Enable
this option after you configure a logical drive and before you exit the Boot Up
Configuration Manager.
The ability to use this feature for an existing logical drive depends on the firmware
version. Older firmware versions may not allow you to enable this feature once you
have saved the configuration.
The Virtual Sizing option is in Power Console Plus versions 1.06 and higher. When you
select this option in Power Console Plus, you must restart the operating system before
Disk Administrator will see the virtual size.
Theory of Operation
When the operating system boots, it looks for storage devices such as HDD, CD-ROMs,
and tape drives. The controller reports these devices to the operating system, except for
the HDD. The controller reports a false disk capacity for the configured Logical Drive.
The value reported to NT's Disk Administrator is approximately 80GB for older
firmware, and 500GB for newer firmware.
Because Disk Administrator recognizes a virtual storage capacity of 80 or 500 GB, the
user or Administrator can create logical drive partitions in the free space on the virtual
disk. In other words, the capacity is already present before the HDD is added, so you do
not need to shut down and reboot the operating system to see the added capacity.