What is Dynamic Disk



A Basic disk uses the normal partition tables found in MS-DOS and Windows. The volumes contained on a basic disk will be basic volumes, such as primary and extended partitions, and logical drives. An Basic disk can have either four primary partitions OR three primary plus one extended partition, but the extended partition can contain an unlimited number of logical drives.

Dynamic disk can contain simple volumes, spanned volumes, striped volumes, mirrored volumes, and RAID-5 volumes. Regardless of whether the dynamic disks on a system use the MBR or GPT partition style, you can create up to 2,000 dynamic volumes on a system, although the recommended number of dynamic volumes is 32 or less.


Dynamic disk can handle all of the following volumes:

  • A volume is a storage unit made from free space on one or more disks. It can be formatted with a file system and assigned a drive letter. Volumes on dynamic disks can have any of the following layouts: simple, spanned, mirrored, striped, or RAID-5.

  • A simple volume uses free space from a single disk. It can be a single region on a disk or consist of multiple, concatenated regions. A simple volume can be extended within the same disk or onto additional disks. If a simple volume is extended across multiple disks, it becomes a spanned volume.

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  • A spanned volume is made from free disk space that is linked together from multiple disks (up to a maximum of 32 disks). A spanned volume can be extended onto additional disks. A spanned volume cannot be mirrored.

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  • A mirrored volume is a fault-tolerant volume whose data is duplicated on two physical disks. All of the data on one volume is copied to another disk to provide data redundancy. If one of the disks fails, the data can still be accessed from the remaining disk. A mirrored volume cannot be extended. Mirroring is also known as RAID-1.

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  • A striped volume is a volume whose data is interleaved across two or more physical disks. The data on this type of volume is allocated alternately and evenly to each of the physical disks. A striped volume cannot be mirrored or extended. Striping is also known as RAID-0.

  • A RAID-5 volume is a fault-tolerant volume whose data is striped across an array of three or more disks. Parity (a calculated value that can be used to reconstruct data after a failure) is also striped across the disk array. If a physical disk fails, the portion of the RAID-5 volume that was on that failed disk can be recreated from the remaining data and the parity. A RAID-5 volume cannot be mirrored or extended.

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Advantages of Dynamic Disks

The main advantage of dynamic disk is the ability to create the various volumes mentioned earlier. These volumes allow the user to store information in a much more diverse manner and provides a level of data protection that is not available in basic disks. While dynamic disks provide more functionality than basic disks, they are generally not considered superior but instead are often used in conjunction with basic disks to create a more stable environment.



Disadvantages of Dynamic Disks

While dynamic disk can be helpful in some situations, they can also be quite a nuisance. This is because dynamic disks have many compatibility issues with other services such as iSCSI, USB, and Firewire and cannot be read by a number of Windows operating systems. It is also important to note that hardware-based systems such as RAID work much faster than software-based applications such as dynamic disks. For these reasons, many people opt to isolate dynamic disks and use them for specific purposes or not use them at all.


Introduction to Hard Drive Partition Types

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