Network Volumes and Network Drives
Network hard drive storage resembles an encyclopaedia in organisation. The Fileserver is like the
name of the encyclopaedia. Then there are Fileserver volumes which correspond to a fixed amount of
hard drive space (like the volume of an encyclopaedia). These volumes can be one entire disk drive, or
comprise several physical disk drives, or part of a disk drive. Usually one disk drive equates to one
Novell volume. These volumes are then divided into subdirectories (chapters of the particular
volume). These subdirectories can and often do correspond to Network drives.
When dealing with networks you need to forget about the idea that a disk drive is a physical quantity
that you can touch. Network drives can be physical drives or logical drives (part of a physical drive).
Often you will want to assign a drive letter to a particular subdirectory of a network drive. When you
type the drive letter, you change to the particular subdirectory that corresponds to the drive letter,
although the screen appears as though you are in a different drive (the drive letter appears.
For example, drive H is often used to signify the user’s home directory.
For USER1 drive H: would correspond to the subdirectory F:\HOME\USER1
For USER2 drive H: would correspond to the subdirectory F:\HOME\USER2
For USER3 drive H: would correspond to the subdirectory F:\HOME\USER3 etc.
This makes it easier to set up software on the system and to assign users rights and privileges to
particular areas. This also illustrates how thinking about drives as absolute quantities on a network is
not correct, and that the same drive letter can stand for different areas for different users.
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