Vista supports two different types of disks: basic disks and dynamic disks. The disk type you use will determine how the physical hard drive space is partitioned and the features that are supported. For example, if you decide to have Windows initialize physical disks as basic disks, you will be able to create primary and extended partitions and logical drives. On the other hand, if disks are initialized as dynamic, you can create simple and spanned volumes and take advantage of additional features.

Note: Dynamic disks are only supported on the Business, Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Vista. Dynamic disks are also not supported on portable computers.

Basic versus Dynamic Disks
Basic disks are supported by all versions of Windows including MS-DOS and Windows NT. A basic disk supports primary partitions, extended partitions, and logical drives. A basic disk also supports different types of Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) including volume sets, stripe sets, mirror sets, and stripe sets with parity.

Dynamic disks were introduced in Windows 2000 and any earlier versions of Windows do not provide support for this type of disk. Dynamic disks support the following disk configurations:

• Simple volumes
• Spanned volumes
• Mirrored volumes
• Striped volumes
• RAID-5 volumes

If you are running Windows 2000 or later, you can use the standard basic disks or convert to dynamic which allows you to take advantage of additional features. When you first install Vista (or any other Windows version that supports this disk type), all disks are initialized as basic. Afterwards, you can optionally convert to a dynamic disk using the Disk Management console.

Many people often ask the question “Why convert from basic to dynamic?” The main reason is to take advantage of additional features that include:

• Disk and volume management tasks can be performed without having to restart the computer afterwards.
• Volumes that span multiple disks can be created. These are referred to as spanned volumes.
• A simple or spanned volume can be extended without losing any data.
• Dynamic disks support an unlimited number (up to 2000) of volumes.
• Dynamic disks do not use a Master Boot Record (MBR). The disk layout information is stored on the last 1 MB of the disk.

[tags]dynamic disk, vista, windows[/tags]