Disks configured on a fresh system are defined as basic disks. You can then upgrade them to dynamic disks.

In general, a basic disk is managed with the Master Boot Record (MBR) or GUID Partition Table (GPT) partitioning scheme and may have partitions defined on it, but this is not required. The MBR style is supported in MS-DOS, Windows 95/98, and later Windows versions. MBR disks can contain up to four primary partitions or three primary partitions plus an extended partition. The extended partition may be further divided into logical drives. The GPT style allows a maximum of 128 primary partitions.

With the MBR style, you can also create new logical drives that reside in extended partitions. The logical drives are simple volumes that are limited to the space on the extended partitions. They cannot span multiple drives.

Basic disks can also contain RAID volumes that were originally created in Windows NT Disk Administrator, including simple and spanned volumes (volume sets), mirrored volumes (mirror sets), striped volumes (stripe sets), and RAID-5 volumes (stripe sets with parity). These volumes are also called "FT volumes" in Windows NT documentation.

SFW versions 5.0 and 5.1 do not support FT volumes. Only earlier versions of SFW provide support for FT volumes.

Versions of SFW earlier than SFW 5.0 let you maintain and repair these volumes but not to create new ones. Although you cannot create new NT Disk Administrator-type volumes on a basic disk, you can upgrade the existing volumes of this type to dynamic. Then these volumes have the full capabilities of other SFW dynamic volumes.