Web Centre

Understanding drives

In its most basic form a drive or hard drive as they are sometimes called is a place where information is stored on a computer.

On your computer at home you might be used to having one, two or three drives but few have more. Usually you have a C: drive which is your main drive where all your data is stored, a D: drive which is often your DVD/CD-ROM, and an A: drive which is your floppy disk drive.

Given this is the case it can be a shock to arrive at University and discover that as a new user you have many more drives than you are used to - and that these drives have uses and restrictions that are not the same as those on a home machine.

A member of staff at the university will get as standard 6 or 7 drives: C, D, E, A, X, Y and Z.

This is what the various drives are for:

The 'local' drives

Local drives are local to the machine you are using - in other words they are inside the machine in front of you. There are 4 local drives typically:

C: This is the main hard drive inside the computer. Unlike a home machine you should NOT save to this drive as it contains lots of vital system files. This includes trying to save to the temporary area on the C: drive called c:\temp.

NOTHING ON THIS DRIVE IS BACKED UP AND IN THE EVENT OF A CATASTROPHIC COMPUTER FAILURE ANYTHING SAVED HERE WOULD BE LOST - IT IS THEREFORE ADVISED THAT PEOPLE DO NOT SAVE ANYTHING OF A CRITICAL OR PRIVATE NATURE ON THIS DRIVE.

D: This is a another local drive that is in fact a part of your C: drive that has been partitioned off and is empty so that you can use it as a temporary store for files when you are using your machine. The amount of storage space varies and is dependent on the size of the original C: drive, larger drives will have a larger D: drive, smaller drives may have small or no D: drive.

NOTHING ON THIS DRIVE IS BACKED UP AND IN THE EVENT OF A CATASTROPHIC COMPUTER FAILURE ANYTHING SAVED HERE WOULD BE LOST - IT IS THEREFORE ADVISED THAT PEOPLE DO NOT SAVE ANYTHING OF A CRITICAL OR PRIVATE NATURE ON THIS DRIVE.

E: This is usually the drive letter assigned to the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. Use it to access any CDs/DVDs that you want to read data off.

A: This is the computer's floppy disk drive. Use it to save small files to floppy disk.

The 'network' drives

A 'network' drive is like a local drive accept the data is not being saved to the machine in front of you - it gets saved to a remote location on the university server. The advantage of this being that if the machine you are working on blows up (stops working) then the work you've done is in fact saved elsewhere and as such is safe. There are 3 basic network drives visible to users at the University of Leicester:

X: This drive is used as a 'departmental shared area'. It is basically 5 gigabytes (gb) of storage space available on the main university server for a department to use as a shared area for it's staff members. The area is controlled and divided up by the departmental Web Maintainer. It is here that members of staff should store files and data that they want other people in the same department to be able to have access to.

THE X: DRIVE IS BACKED UP AND AS SUCH IS A SAFE PLACE TO STORE CRITICAL DATA.

Y: This drive is the 'software drive'. This drive is used as a place for the system files associated with the various software programs that run on your computer i.e. Word, Excel, Photoshop Elements, Dreamweaver, etc. It's basically off-limits and you should not be able to save anything here.

Z: This drive is what's called your 'CFS filestore', the 300 megabytes (300 mb) of storage space that goes with your computer profile and moves with you from machine to machine. This area is where things that you save in your 'My Documents' folder are stored. Stuff saved on your desktop will not be included in this area, so saving to the desktop should be avoided.

THE Z: DRIVE IS BACKED UP AND AS SUCH IS A SAFE PLACE TO STORE CRITICAL DATA.