Windows Add Disk

This page describes several alternatw methods for adding disk to Windows systems

Server Manager

In Server Manager go to File and Storage Services - Disks, right click on one of the the new disks and choose New Volume.

This will initialize the disk in GPT (GUID Partition Table) format. If you need MBR (Master Boot Record) format then use the Disk Management method (see later on this page) instead.
If you named your base disks after the drive letter you intended for them then there is no way of identifying which disk is which within the tool. Workarounds are to add disks one by one, create them with different sizes (if appropriate), or give them a more generic name in future.
NTFS or ReFS (Resilient FileSystem). Choose ReFS unless the drive needs to be bootable, or the filesystem compressed or encrypted - BitLocker encryption works, just not filesystem encryption (1).
Allocation unit size can generally be left as default unless you have good reason to explicitly set it.
Give the volume a suitable name (e.g. SQL Data).

Disk Management

Type diskmgmt.msc from a command prompt (e.g. Powershell) OR in Server Manager choose Tools - Computer Management - Disk Management




Right-click on the disk you just initialized
Simple 1 disk, 1 volumeSpannedn disks, 1 volume sequentially mapping space from all disks. i.e. 2 equally sized disks with volume 50% used means only one disk holding data.Stripedn disks, 1 volume striped across all disks. i.e. 2 equally sized disks with volume 50% used means both disks should also be 50% used.Mirroredn disks, 1 volume with mirrored copy i.e. 50% of disk space usable but protected from disk failure.
If disks are LUNs from a SAN, then you should use a Simple volume

Powershell

TODO ** Not Yet Fully Tested ***

Assumes your newly added disk appears in Get-Disk as Number 1 with an OperationalStatus of Offline, and you want to mount it as drive G:...

Get-Disk

Set-Disk -Number 1 -IsOffline $False

Initialize-Disk 1

New-Partition -DiskNumber 1 -DriveLetter G -UseMaximumSize

Format-Volume -DriveLetter G -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel "SQL Backups"