Dynamic disk? (AKICILJ)

[redbird]

Does anyone here have experience of a "dynamic disk"? It appears to be something that can be done under Windows XP and has options including setting up RAID 5 on one disk. I asked cattitude for his opinion of that versus a basic disk, and he'd never heard of dynamic disks.

So, the questions are, does this have any clear advantages, what are the disadvantages, and is it supported under Windows 7?

Comments

[spacecrab.livejournal.com]

Dynamic disks are primarily designed for servers; either to speed up disk write operations when a large number of users will access the volumes, or to create backup redundancy in case of disk failure.

Although Windows XP has the ability to create dynamic disks, it can only do so for a Windows server OS. You can't actually set up a software-based RAID-1 (Mirrored Disks) that runs the Windows XP OS. See here (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343).

I think Windows 7 does have support for disk mirroring, but this feature is really intended for use with two physical hard drives rather than two partitions on the same physical disk.

Also, generally, you can't create dynamic disks on a laptop PC. What I do with Vista and XP on my laptop is simply to clone the single hard disk (with four Basic Volume partitions) to a second laptop drive that I periodically attach to the computer through a USB converter and synchronize. This doesn't have the advantage of real-time synchronization offered by RAID-1. But if one disk fails, I can easily switch to the other one.

[redbird]

Thanks, that's what I needed to know.

This is a second hard disk, so I could probably clone my existing C: drive onto it (with room to spare).