harddrive question: dynamic disk, basic disk

[Taylorm]

whats the diff between dynamic disc and basic disk? I installed a new hd,quickformat,and its listed as dynamic disk, while my otheres are basic disc. just curious

thanks

 

[Megatomic]

Short and sweet answer:

With a dynamic disk, you can span, mirror, stripe, or even RAID volumes through Windows and take a significant performance hit but that does give you quite a bit of flexibility. A basic disk cannot do those things without a RAID controller card.

In most cases, basic disks are fine for workstations. Dynamic disks are recommended for server applications.

 

[Pothead]

once you have a dynamic disk, you must format to get a basic disk back.

 

[SUOrangeman]

Additionally, dynamic disks only works with Win2K, WinXP, and (presumably) dotNet Server incarnations. If you EVER plan of using something else (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.), do not use dynamic disk.

-SUO

 

[GrumpyMan]

If you use an application such as Diskimage 2002, it will not let you restore and image from a dynamic disk if it is used as the back up destination.