Drive Letters on Windows Server 2016

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

Cipher

Member
Aug 8, 2014
159
15
18
53
Hi Guys,

I've got a single Windows 2016 server that contains the following drives:

1) 1x 200GB Intel SATA SSD Drive (in SC216 chassis)
-This is the OS Drive

2) 12x 400GB WD SAS SSD Drives (in SC216 chassis)
-Each drive contains one or more Hyper-V VM images

3) 14x 3TB WD SATA Red Drives (in SC846 chassis)
-These are storage drives. Most are storing Blu-ray (Movie and TV) rips from my library and are accessed through a Plex server which I installed in one of the Hyper-V VM images.

With each drive currently mapped to a letter I have now used up all 27 letters in the alphabet. Since I have room for another 12 SSD's in my SC216 chassis and another 10 SATA drives in my SC846 chassis I'm trying to figure out the best way to proceed as I add more drives. I was hoping Server 2016 would support adding drive names like A1, B2 etc, but this doesn't look possible.

Any recommendations on how to proceed here and any gotchas I should be aware of?

Thank you
 

superfula

Member
Mar 8, 2016
88
14
8
While it doesn't specifically answer your question, I'm curious why you haven't created a drive pool in Storage Spaces or via a RAID setup. Do you have a need to keep the drives seperate?
 

Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
2,644
1,496
113
Google the following terms for solution
create NTFS mounted drives
or
windows mount points vs drive letters

Copy and paste , quote from this thread
https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=925985

Mount points rule !!!


With mount points, one can organize his FS however he wants to and it is much easier to spread a system over multiple partitions/disks than with drive-letters. And I find it much better to have everything available from one central point than having everything split under C:, D;, etc...
 
  • Like
Reactions: ecosse

Cipher

Member
Aug 8, 2014
159
15
18
53
While it doesn't specifically answer your question, I'm curious why you haven't created a drive pool in Storage Spaces or via a RAID setup. Do you have a need to keep the drives seperate?
Hi Superfula,

I never used RAID setups in my servers as I've always used them in JBOD mode.

Storage Spaces is something I've been meaning to look at, but I haven't had a chance to read up on this technology.
 

Cipher

Member
Aug 8, 2014
159
15
18
53
Google the following terms for solution
create NTFS mounted drives
or
windows mount points vs drive letters

Copy and paste , quote from this thread
https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=925985

Mount points rule !!!


With mount points, one can organize his FS however he wants to and it is much easier to spread a system over multiple partitions/disks than with drive-letters. And I find it much better to have everything available from one central point than having everything split under C:, D;, etc...
Very interesting, Marsh. I don't believe I read about this before so I'll have to check this out to see if it makes sense. I should probably invest some time reading about storage spaces as well to see which is a better option.

All my VM drives in the SC chassis were installed with ReFS and all the Storage drives on the SC846 chassis were installed with NTFS so it looks like all my drives are currently supported.

I just hope I can migrate to one of these solutions without having to backup my data first.
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
1,439
320
83
30041
Also check out Stablebit drivepool. It allows you to pool all your drives into one drive letter
 
  • Like
Reactions: EricE

EricE

New Member
May 11, 2017
12
1
3
57
Also check out Stablebit drivepool. It allows you to pool all your drives into one drive letter
For Plex I would also highly recommend Stablebit Drivepool. I started using it with Windows Home Server to also use with Plex and it's a heck of a lot easier and more reliable than storage spaces for what you want to do.