• A dynamic disk is a hard disk initialized to use dynamic storage technology.
• A dynamic disk storage provides the flexibility to logically organize disk space across one or more disk drives. It was first introduced with Windows 2000. Both MBR and GPT partition styles can be conf gured as dynamic disk storage.
• On dynamic disks, the blocks of space are called volumes. The details about the volumes are stored in a hidden database on the dynamic disk. Dynamic volumes cannot contain partitions or logical drives.
• A dynamic disk technology is not appropriate for removable disk storage because the member- ship is tracked for all dynamic disks in the computer. If a disk was removed, the remaining disks could be impacted. .
  
  A dynamic volume must be aware of the other dynamic volumes on the computer because some types of dynamic volumes interact with each other. This can increase file system capacity or provide fault tolerance through the operating system. Basic disks do not provide this functionality.
• The following five volume types are supported by dynamic disks:
• Simple: A simple volume contains space from a single dynamic drive. The space from the single drive can be contiguous or noncontiguous. Simple volumes are used when you have enough disk space on a single drive to hold your entire volume.
• Spanned: A spanned volume consists of disk space on two or more dynamic drives; up to 32 dynamic drives can be used in a spanned volume configuration. Spanned volume sets are used to dynamically increase the size of a dynamic volume.

  When you create spanned volumes, the data is written sequentially, filling space on one physical drive before writing to space on the next physical drive in the spanned volume set.

  Typically, administrators use spanned volumes when they are running out of disk space on a volume and want to dynamically extend the vol-ume with space from another hard drive.

  You do not need to allocate the same amount of space to the volume set on each physical drive. This means you could combine a 500 GB partition on one physical drive with two 750 GB partitions on other dynamic drives

• Striped: A striped volume stores data in equal stripes between two or more (up to 32) dynamic drives. Because the data is written sequentially in the stripes, you can take advantage of multiple I/O performances and increase the speed at which data reads and writes take place.

  Typically, administrators use striped volumes when they want to combine the space of several physical drives into a single logical volume and increase disk performance.

  The main disadvantage of striped volumes is that if any drive in the striped volume set fails, you lose access to all the data in the striped set.

• Mirrored: A mirrored dynamic volume can only be created with two dynamic disks. A block of space on one dynamic disk must be matched to an identically sized block of space on a second dynamic disk. The operating system presents the space of just one block as the total space available in the mirrored volume. This process provides for data redundancy called fault tolerance. If one disk fails, the data can be accessed from the second disk.


• RAID 5 (software-based Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks): It is a fault tolerance version of a strped volume. A RAID 5 dynamic volume can only be created with three or more dynamic disks. Similar to a striped dynamic volume, the RAID 5 volume will stripe data and error-correcting information about the data across each of the dynamic disk members.
  
  Read more about RAID technology at:
  http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/eserver/v1r2/index.jsp?topic=/diricinfo/fqy0_craidint.html.

To set up dynamic storage, you create or upgrade a basic disk to a dynamic disk. When you convert a basic disk to dynamic, you do not lose any of your data. After the disk is converted, you can then create dynamic volumes within the dynamic disk. You create dynamic storage with the Windows 7 Disk Management utility.