AWS Storage Gateway User Guide
Using Your Volume
Initializing and Formatting Your Volume on Microsoft Windows
Use the following procedure to initialize and format your volume on Windows.
To initialize and format your storage volume
1. Start
diskmgmt.msc
to open the
Disk Management
console.
2. In the
Initialize Disk
dialog box, initialize the volume as a
MBR (Master Boot Record)
partition.
When selecting the partition style, you should take into account the type of volume you are
connecting to—cached or stored—as shown in the following table.
Partition Style
Use in the Following Conditions
MBR (Master Boot
Record)
• If your gateway is a stored volume and the storage volume is limited to
1 TiB in size.
• If your gateway is a cached volume and the storage volume is less than 2
TiB in size.
GPT (GUID Partition
Table)
If your gateway's storage volume is 2 TiB or greater in size.
3. Create a simple volume:
a. Bring the volume online to initialize it. All the available volumes are displayed in the disk
management console.
b. Open the context (right-click) menu for the disk, and then choose
New Simple Volume
.
Important
Be careful not to format the wrong disk. Check to make sure that the disk you are
formatting matches the size of the local disk you allocated to the gateway VM and that
it has a status of
Unallocated
.
c.
Specify the maximum disk size.
d. Assign a drive letter or path to your volume, and format the volume by choosing
Perform a
quick format
.
Important
We strongly recommend using
Perform a quick format
for cached volumes. Doing so
results in less initialization I/O, smaller initial snapshot size, and the fastest time to a
usable volume. It also avoids using cached volume space for the full format process.
Note
The time that it takes to format the volume depends on the size of the volume. The
process might take several minutes to complete.
Initializing and Formatting Your Volume on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Use the following procedure to initialize and format your volume on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
To initialize and format your storage volume
1. Change directory to the
/dev
folder.
2. Run the
sudo cfdisk
command.
3. Identify your new volume by using the following command. To find new volumes, you can list the
partition layout of your volumes.
$ lsblk
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