This Q&A was previously posted on the Stack Exchange Network of websites.
This content is licensed under the Creative Commmons Attribution-Sharealike (CC BY-SA) license. As the author of these answers, this archive serves as a canonical location for permalinks, which will outlive Stack Overflow. See all my answers by looking at the Stack Exchange post category.
Is it ok to change drive names/labels (NOT Drive Letters!)
Question
I realize this is likely a simplistic question but my searches only return results for Drive Letters or Database names if I include SQL Server. Please feel free to point me to existing articles or answers, and my apologies in advance 🙂
I’ve inherited an environment with several SQL Server 2014 and 2016 servers (a few clustered as well) that support multiple SharePoint 2013 & 2016 farms. The previous SAs named/labeled the drives some fairly ambiguous names and I’d like to save myself continued confusion over what each contains by renaming the drives. Is this a bad idea? I can’t seem to find anything in my environment that refers specifically to drive names, everything seems to choose the drive letter and in some cases a drive name is rendered as informational.
Am I right that the drive name is just a description and doesn’t actually identify the drive itself to any systems?
asked 2021-09-01 by rebekah
Answer
SQL Server won’t care if you change the drive label.
If you’re using some sort of automation like Puppet or Terraform to manage storage, it’s possible that automation uses it. I’ve seen folks make use of the label when matching up Windows disks with Storage LUNs. It’s not guaranteed, but possible.
SQL Server will be fine if you change that label, just check with your friendly Storage administrator to make sure they don’t care either.
answered 2021-09-01 by Andy Mallon