What are the advantages of changing my basic disks to dynamic disks? I’m using W2K Pro. 2 IDE hdd.
IDE0> C: (FAT32–6.5GB) used to have Win98, now it’s just there
E: (FAT32–4.2GB) holds applications that used to be shared b/t Win98 and W2k like device drivers and AOL
F: (NTFS–20GB) W2K system and associated programs: Office, etc
RedHat uses the rest of the space (total 40GB) for ext2 and swap
IDE1> D: (NTFS–40GB) all used for downloading songs etc
I don’t care about Win98 not seeing a dynamic volume b/c i never use it anymore and won’t use it in the past. But would access time be faster? I’m just wondering about the benefits since the Help file doesn’t say much about volumes. So is there anything relevant to dynamic disks besides support for RAID or some other redudancy which i don’t care about on my system?
There are none, really. Dynamic disk is a software RAID (Redundant Array of Independant Disks) solution. Hardware RAID offers advantages such as dramatically increased performance and reliability, but when done in software, the CPU overhead more than erases any performance gains. You also need identical drives to make any effective use of it.
To further comment on what FDISK has said, or rather to clarify; a dynamic disk is required in order to make use some of win2k’s advanced disk management features.
From the Windows 2000 Server online help files:
In short, dynamic disks support the ability to reactivate a failed disk (eg you’ve got a dodgy power connection on a drive/a cable falls out) on the fly and is a pre-requisite for software redundancy such as mirroring and RAID5.
You’ll notice my quote is from the win2k server help files (win2k pro’s help files are conveniently unhelpful).
Here’s the catch. Win2k Professional doesn’t support any software redundancy. No mirroring or RAID5. So why have dynamic disks under Win2k Pro?
Win2k Pro does support striping, which provides speed benefits by reading/writing across multiple drives. You can use 2-32 dynamic disks in a striped volume.
It is also required to extend a volume over multiple physical disks (spanned volumes). Spanned volumes offer no redundancy. They exist purely to add more hard drive space while keeping a single drive letter. You cannot extend a striped volume.
So (are you still awake?), the short answer is this:
Easier to recover from minor hardware failures
The ability to use software RAID0 (striping without parity)
The ability to extend existing volumes onto a new physical disk
You won’t get any speed benefits from dynamic disks per se. This would come from using a striped volume as described above. As FDISK was also quick to point out, all the work of software RAID is offset to your system’s CPU. The overhead associated with it may well outweigh the benefit of using it. With hardware IDE RAID standard on most mainboards these days, I can’t see any purpose for using a software RAID0 solution in your particular scenario, Muldoon. If you were using SCSI drives, it might be worth doing, simply because SCSI hardware RAID solutions are still quite expensive.