Moving a mailbox from one Exchange Database to another is a very simple process. Exchange uses the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) to store the mailboxes into the .edb Databases. The emails are processed by the RAM memory on the server and transaction logs before getting committed to the Database.
During a default installation of Exchange Server the Mailbox Database is created in the default installation directory along with Exchange binaries (\..\Exchange Server\V15\Mailbox). As a best practice for performance and recoverability purposes the Mailbox Databases should be created in a different storage. This article is covering this scenario
 Let’s login to the Exchange Control Panel page
The +Â button will give us the option to create a new Mailbox Database
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It is possible to create multiple Databases. Of course this depends on the number of mailboxes, size and available storage . Ideally the Database Data and Logs should be stored in different locations and possibly not locally on the Exchange Server for disaster recovery purposes
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After Adding a new Database let’s restart the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service and making sure new changes are applied
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Now browsing the Data and Logs folders I can see the respective files have been created
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In particular:
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*.edb this is the main Database data file
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*.log these are all the transactions for Read/Write operations before being committed to data file
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*.chk this file store the information about the transactions already executed to the data file
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*.jrs these files are used when the drive is running out of space and transactions cannot be commited as of yet. Typically these files are empty and do not contain valuable data and are created in case of data volume running out of space. A sort of “extended” *.log file
Now that we have created a dedicate Mailbox Database next step is to create a Mailbox which is part of the next article
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