dynamic disk : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

2007-04-17 by Roedy Green ©1997-2009 Canadian Mind Products
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dynamic disk

A alternative hard disk partitioning scheme used in W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista. The advantage is you can set some space in reserve and add it later to whichever partition grows fastest, without using PartitionMagic at $70.00 USD for a single machine copy protected version. Dynamic Disk lets you grow and shrink partitions without rebooting, The disadvantages of Dynamic Disk are:

You cannot not move or slide partitions, so you can’t shrink your partitions then squeeze them up for faster speed or grow a partition when one is just past it.
You cannot revert to ordinary partitioning.
You cannot boot into other operating systems, e.g. Linux.
There may be a problem with ghosting Dynamic Disk machines.
It cannot move files, so you must have previously defragged your disk in a way that removes all files from the region you want to shrink.

This is just another example of Microsoft monopolistic dirty pool. Why would anyone in their right mind use it?

spanned volumes. Giant volumes spanning more than one physical disk.
striped volumes. Volumes with alternating stripes on different drives.
mirrored volumes. Live backup.
RAID-5 volumes.

Happily, home editions of XP and Vista don’t support dynamic disk, just basic partitions, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Acronis Disk Director
boot manager
hard disk
partition
PartitionMagic

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