Introduction

Before we can describe file systems, it's important that you understand how Solaris views the disk drives and various other hardware components on your system. In particular, you need to understand how these devices are configured and named before you can create a file system on them or install the Solaris operating environment.

Device management in the Solaris 10 environment includes adding and removing peripheral devices from a system, such as tape drives, disk drives, printers, and modems. Device management also involves adding a third-party device driver to support a device if the device driver is not available in Sun's distribution of the Solaris operating environment. System administrators need to know how to specify device names if using commands to manage disks, file systems, and other devices.

This chapter describes disk device management in detail. It also describes disk device naming conventions as well as adding, configuring, and displaying information about disk devices attached to your system.