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| Advantages of dynamic volumes | ||
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One of the main advantages of dynamic volumes is that they can span across multiple disks. You can get better use of your available disk space by combining areas of unallocated space in the volumes that go across multiple disks. Multi-disk volumes also improve disk performance by letting more than one disk drive read and write data. Finally, multi-disk volumes let you use RAID technology to make volumes fault tolerant.
When you upgrade a disk so that it can contain dynamic volumes, Storage Foundation writes a small database onto the upgraded disk that contains volume management information about the disk and all other dynamic disks in its disk group. This database gives a dynamic disk additional advantages, which are as follows:
Users can create dynamic volumes without restarting the system.
Volumes can be accessed continuously, even across disk reconfiguration events.
All dynamic volumes with an NTFS or ReFS file system can be extended online. You can select where to extend the volume, or Storage Foundation assigns space optimally on the disks available within the volume's dynamic disk group.
Disk configuration information is contained on the disk, not in the registry. The disk configuration information is also replicated across all dynamic disks in the disk group so that the failure of one disk does not obstruct access to data on other disks.
Dynamic disks provide volume migration, which is the ability to move a disk or disks containing a volume or volumes from one system to another system without loss of data.
Dynamic disks let you move portions of volumes (subdisks) between disks on a single computer system to optimize performance.