Disk quotas track and control disk space usage for volumes. Severe disk and server performance problems result when the network disks reach capacity. Unless disk restrictions have been placed on end users, your server disks could fill up quickly when they decide to dump their whole hard drive data to a directory, or formulate that the network is probably the best place to store their downloaded Napster files. Using Windows 2000 Disk Quotas System, administrators can configure Windows to do the following:

* Prevent further disk space use and log an event when a user exceeds a specified disk space limit.
* Log an event when a user exceeds a specified disk space warning level.

When you enable disk quotas, you can set two values: the disk quota limit and the disk quota warning level. The limit specifies the amount of disk space a user is allowed to use, and the warning level specifies the point at which a user is nearing his or her quota limit. For example, you can set a user's disk quota limit to 50 megabytes (MB), and the disk quota warning level to 45 MB. In this case, the user can store no more than 50 MB of files on the volume. If the user stores more than 45 MB of files on the volume, you can have the disk quota system log a system event.

On the reverse side, enabling quotas causes a slight increase in server overhead, and therefore causes a slight decrease in file server performance. However, by periodically enabling and then disabling quotas, you can take advantage of the auditing capabilities provided by Windows disk quotas without reducing the performance of your file server on a day-to-day basis.

About the author: Rod Trent is a site expert on SearchWindowsManageability.com. He is also the author of Microsoft SMS Installer (McGraw-Hill) and Admin911-SMS (Osborne).