Jun, 2010 by www.dynamic-disk.com      click here view more articles

Dynamic Disk Discussion

For Windows business operating system, you can free choose the disk as either a basic disk or a dynamic disk. A basic disk is used by most common of users, it just a normal hard drive with no special features. If you convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk by windows built-in disk manager, you will get a serious performance boost. Dynamic disk supports data redundancy, fault tolerance and some level of properties.

Dynamic Disk can be applied to the following operating system:

• Windows 2000 All Editions
• Windows 2003 All Editions
• Windows 2008 All Editions
• Windows XP Professional Edition
• Windows Vista Business Edition and Ultimate Edition
• Windows 7 Professional Edition and Ultimate Edition

The following operating system does not support dynamic disk:

• Windows XP Home Edition
• Windows Vista Home Basic Edition and Home Premium Edition
• Windows 7 Home Basic Edition and Home Premium Edition

Through dynamic disks, you can do things like spanning volumes between multi-disks (this is useful function when you find your data volume is running low disk space). You can also stripe a volume to help the volume spans multiple hard drives but that on the volume each files is actually spread over the disks in the stripe set. Obviously, striping volume can dramatically increase the IO performance because all files and data are read from and written to simultaneously multiple hard disks. For instance, if you make a striped volume that consist of four hard disks, then one four of the file would be on each disk. Thus, the file could be read in one four the time that it would take, because all disks are being simultaneously accessed.

In addition, dynamic disks provide a fault tolerance for protecting your data. One fault tolerance mechanism is called mirroring disk (it must consist of two disks). This means is that anything will be written simultaneously to the two disks. So, if disks fail or corrupt, you have a backup to replace the corrupted disk. Another fault tolerance volume is RAID-5 (that is striping volume with parity; consist of three disks at least). It is a combination of striping and mirroring volume, and you will find it not only can be fault-tolerant and also improve the read/write speed of data.

Dynamic Disk Partition Management

You can press WIN + R, enter DISKMGMT.MSC in the run dialog to launch the Disk Management Console. This console will allow you to view current disk configuration and configure or manage your basic disk and dynamic disk. You can also upgrade your existing basic disk to dynamic, and then you can do the following works on dynamic disks:

• Create, delete and format dynamic volume.
• Extend and shrink simple volume or spanned volume.
• Expand a simple volume to become spanned volume.
• Add mirror for dynamic system volume and each of simple volume.
• Break or remove mirrored volume to simple volume.
• Add, remove and change drive letter for each of dynamic volume.
• Import foreign dynamic disks.
• Reactivate missing or failed dynamic disks.
• Explore dynamic disk properties (e.g. total space, free space and used space etc).
• Convert an unallocated or empty dynamic disk to basic.

According to different Windows Versions, you can use the above features which are different too. Windows disk manager is unable to allow you do below:

• Make system boot volume become spanned volume.
• Directly convert dynamic disk containing dynamic volumes to basic.
• Extend and shrink striped volume and RAID-5.
• Directly resize mirrored volume.
• Move dynamic volume from one location to another.
• Repair unreadable or invalid dynamic disk.

On dynamic disks, you can create a various volumes including simple, spanned, striped, mirrored and RAID 5 volumes to meet your different requirements. You could assign a drive letter and volume label to differentiate them.

Extend, Shrink and Resize Dynamic Volume

Firstly, you must be aware that only simple volume and spanned volume can be resized. You cannot use Windows disk manager to resize a striped and RAID-5 volume. For the mirrored volume, you may indirectly enlarge, reduce or resize it.

Secondly, under Windows XP/2000/2003, Windows built-in disk manager is unable to shrink dynamic volume, but you can extend dynamic simple volume by the only way that uses spanning multi-disks. Meanwhile, the existing spanned volume can be extended again when it is too low disk space or you want to increase more free space for it.

Besides, under Windows 7/Vista/2008, you can extend dynamic volume as well as shrink, in other words, you can resize dynamic volume via the free disk manager. The following is an example to help you clarify.

Resize Dynamic Partition (Volume) Example

Similar to Vista, Windows 7 and Server 2008, they have the option to resize dynamic partition/volume, this means you can shrink or extend partition on the dynamic disk. At the first, enter DISKMGMT.MSC to open Windows disk manager as follows.

If you want to extend dynamic volume, right click on it then choose "Extend Volume…" and then next step you need to specify the amount of space by which you want to extend the dynamic partition.

To resize dynamic volume to smaller space, right click the volume you desired to shrink and select the menu option "Shrink Volume…" as above screenshot. This will pop up the Shrink Dynamic Volume Dialog and you also need to specify the amount of space that you want to shrink.

You could practice this in order to find more valuable things. You also indirectly resize mirrored volume, the particular method is that break the mirror before resize it, after completing the resize, you can again add mirror for the volume. Another way is that first convert dynamic disk to basic with Dynamic Disk Converter and then using a partition manager to resize the basic partition. After resizing the partition, again convert the basic disk to dynamic and add mirror to re-make it become mirrored volume.

Conclusion for Extend, Shrink and Resize Dynamic Volume

Dynamic disk provides some features which basic disk does not have. We can create simple volume, spanned volume, striped volume, mirrored volume and RAID 5 volume to suit your all kinds of requirements. Also, it can better protect data and enhance read/write performance by fault tolerance and striped volume. Windows 7/Vista/2008 offer the better disk management features compared to XP/2000/2003. With disk manager help, it is possible to resize dynamic volume or shrink and extend partition on the dynamic disk without depending on other third-party partition software.

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