Chapter 10: Managing Volumes and RAID on Dynamic Disks

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Overview

When you work with dynamic disks, you create volumes instead of partitions. A volume is simply a disk section that you can use for storing data directly. Although you create volumes in much the same way as you do in creating partitions, volumes have many additional capabilities. You can

• Create a volume on a single drive, called a simple volume.

• Extend volumes to fill empty space on a disk, which creates an extended volume.

• Create a single volume that spans multiple drives, called a spanned volume.

• Configure RAID (a redundant array of independent disks). Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Professional support RAID-0, RAID-1, and RAID-5.

Because volumes and RAID arrays are created on dynamic drives, they are accessible only by Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. So if you dual-boot a computer to a previous version of Windows, the dynamic drives are unavailable. Over a network, however, dynamic drives can be accessed as you would access any other drive. This means that computers running previous versions of Windows can access the drives over the network.

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