A colleague recently asked me
Quote :
ok, so what’s the real reason you might add the ‘file server’ role to a windows 2003 server vs just sharing a drive?
I didn’t know the answer, and honestly he didn’t ask like that. But I digress way too early to care, so what I wanted to share with the world is I found the answer pretty quickly at
http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/w2k3/W2K3_server_roles.htm
It’s quite a good little list. Me likey!
and here’s the little snippet I got from it regarding the file server role.
Quote :
Unlike the above roles, file servers should be member servers, installing Active Directory here would be a disadvantage. Here are is your checklist of features for a file server that you might wish to deploy.
- Disk Quotas – NTFS partitions
- Share and NTFS Permissions – Share Wizard, here is a wizard I really like
- Offline Settings for laptops
- DFS and or RAID
- Indexing service (Forgotten Service)
- RAID and or DFS?
- New feature – Shadow Copies
File servers have always combined well with print servers.
