Dynamic Disk and RAID Levels 0,1,5

Dynamic storage is supported in Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. A disk initialized for dynamic storage is called a dynamic disk. A dynamic disk contains dynamic volumes, such as:

1. Simple volumes,
2. Spanned volumes,
3. Striped volumes, (RAID 0)
4. Mirrored volumes, (RAID 1)
5. RAID-5 volumes. (Striped with Parity)

R – Redundant
A – Array of
I - Inexpensive/Independent
D – Disk

A basic disk doesn’t support above features. We can convert a basic disk into dynamic disk any time without data loss. But to convert a dynamic disk into Basic disk we need to format whole hard-disk so backup your data before converting.

When we convert a basic disk into dynamic disk, all primary partition & Logical partition changes to Simple
Volume & free space of extended partition become unallocated partition. With dynamic storage, you can
perform disk and volume management without the need to restart Windows.

1) Simple Volume: It’s Similar to primary partition but you can extend size of simple Vol. without data loss. But you can’t reduce size of Vol. If you extend size from same hard-disk it will be simple volume, but if you extend size from different HDD it will become spanned Vol.

2) Spanned Volume: you can create a single volume containing size of multiple HDD. It means you can create 160 GB Vol. by using two HDD of 80 GB.

You can use Min- 2 HDD
MAX – 32 HDD

3) Striped Volume: You can create a single volume using multiple HDD. It takes equal size from all disk, it saves data of 64kb in all HDD in a scattered way. It enhances volume’s read & write performance. It provides no fault tolerance. If any disk crashes your all data will become inaccessible.

You can use Min- 2 HDD
MAX – 32 HDD

4) Mirrored Volume: It takes two hard disks. It saves same data in both disks. It means it automatically copy data in to second HDD. In this 80GB Vol. will take two HDD of 80GB.
It is Fault tolerance & its overhead is 50%

5) RAID 5: It combines the feature of striped volume & mirrored Vol. It also saves data of 64 kb like striped volume. It also saves parity (Compressed form of data) in another disk. For 160GB Vol. you will require Three HDD of 80GB each.
It is Fault tolerance & its overhead is 33%

You can use Min- 3 HDD
MAX – 32 HDD