Compared to basic disk, dynamic disk has following characteristic:

(1) It may change disk capacity at random. You can change the capacity of disk without losing data and restarting computer. That of basic disk may lose data.

(2) Disk space limitation. Dynamic disk may be extended to discontinuous disk space in disk. It also may create volume collection that crosses disks and gather several disks into a big volume collection. While basic disk partition must be in a continual space on the same disk which cannot cross disks. The partition maximum capacity is disk capacity.

(3) Volume collection or partition number. Dynamic disk does not have limit about the volume collection number on a disk. But basic disk only can divide into 4 or 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition mostly in a disk. But extended partition may contain several logical drives.


Disk allocation information. Disk allocation information of dynamic disk is stored in disk, not in registry or other place that is not good for renew. At the same time disk allocate information can be copied to other dynamic disks. Thus, it is convenient for dynamic disk to be transplanted between different machines.

Visiting Speed of disk. Basic read-write speed is determined by hardware, which cannot promote disk efficiency without extra extend. But dynamic disk may create striped volume to deal with read-write operations to many disks at the same time, thus promoting disk efficiency.

Fault-tolerant function of disk. The basic disk has no fault-tolerance, nor provides data protection measures. If the disk is out of order without backup, data will be lost. While dynamic disk may create the mirror volume, data would be "mirrored" automatically to mirror volume. thus reducing data loss to the lowest. At the same time, parity check provided by Raid-5 also can protect data from losing.

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