Basic and dynamic disks


Basic and dynamic disks
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Physical disks under SFW's control are either basic or dynamic. Disks that are configured on a fresh system are defined as basic disks. You can upgrade them to dynamic disks by making the disks part of a dynamic disk group.

Basic and Dynamic disk details are as follows:

Basic disks	Basic disks adhere to the partition-oriented scheme of Windows NT, Windows 95/98, and MS-DOS. Basic disks can also contain RAID volumes that were created in NT Disk Administrator. In addition, CD-ROMs and other removable media are considered basic disks.
Dynamic Disks	Dynamic disks can contain dynamic volumes that are created with Storage Foundation. The five dynamic volume types are concatenated (includes simple and spanned volumes), mirrored, striped, RAID-5, and mirrored striped (RAID 0+1). On a dynamic disk, space is organized through dynamic volumes rather than partitions.

Because a dynamic disk does not have the partitioning scheme used by Windows NT, Windows 95/98, and MS-DOS, you cannot access dynamic disks through those operating systems.