Disk Management Prior to 10.0 HP-UX

Prior to the 10.0 release of HP-UX, disks were managed differently depending on whether your system was a Series 800 or a Series 700.

On the Series 800, disks contained pre-defined sections of fixed size, each section appearing to the operating system as a separate disk. This traditional built-in partitioning method is referred to as disk sectioning, or "hard partitions". Different sections of a single disk could be used for a boot area, file system, swap area, dump area, or raw data area.

For the 9.0 release, a second method of disk partitioning using logical volumes was introduced on the Series 800. Using a logical volume allowed for the combination of portions of one or more disks into a single unit.

On the Series 700, neither disk sectioning nor logical volumes were supported in pre-10.0 releases. Instead, disks contained only a single section. Such non-partitioned disks are also referred to as whole disks. A single disk could contain a file system and optionally a swap area and a boot area. An entire disk could also be used as a raw data area, dump device, or swap area.

As of the 8.07 release, disks on the Series 700 could also be managed using Software Disk Striping (SDS). SDS distributed data across a single or multiple disks to improve performance and also provided some of the flexible disk partitioning found by using logical volumes.