Storage Management (Compact 2013)
3/26/2014
A store is a stream device that a block driver exports. The store can be a hard drive, CD-ROM, memory storage card, or any other media.
Storage Manager handles all external storage items, including all file systems and block drivers. All file, data, and volume manipulation goes through Storage Manager. Storage Manager uses three major elements: Block Driver Manager, Partition Manager, and File System Driver (FSD) Manager.
Storage Manager acts as a central manager for all I/O to the disk or other permanent storage medium. Because all disk-related I/O must travel through the layers of Storage Manager, the layers filter the disk I/O. The layers trap any calls and perform encryption, compression, and virus scanning before disk I/O gets to the appropriate file system. Then, the file system sends commands to Partition Manager, or directly to the block drivers to be run. You can call DeviceIoControl on an hStore or hPartition that is returned from other APIs that causes an I/O control to be sent directly to the block driver.
To manipulate storage devices, use the Storage Manager Control Panel application.
To add this feature to your OS, set the SYSGEN_STOREMGR environment variable.
For reference information, see Storage Manager Reference.
See Also
Reference
Storage Manager Registry Settings