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Basic vs Dynamic 1

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MattWray

Technical User
Nov 2, 2001
2,332
US
What would some of the pros and cons be of using dynamic disks vs basic? Right now mine are all basic and I'm thinking of upgrading to dynamic, just not sure why or what the difference would be. Thanks.. Matt Wray
CCNA, MCP
mwray77518@yahoo.com
 
Hi Matt, you have been so kind to give me some help on the configuration of the RRAS and I may be able to reciprocate on the topic.

Dynamic disks let you create,, extend and delete fault tolerant and multidisk volumes on the fly. To implement any raid ie raid 1 for mirroring or raid 5 you need dynamic disks. I have two drives on my home server with a volume mirrored for critical data. the O/S is on its own 2 gig partition and I have partitioned several other logical drives our for things like MP3 music, share space etc. Besides raid support, dynamic disks allow you to extend the capacity of a logical drive on the fly (really cool) I keep some unallocated space reserved to do just that if I am running short on one of the drives.

The downside of dynamic disks is that you will be unable to run any pre-win2K O/S on it. If you want to dual boot with say win98 you need to keep the disks basic. AAnother linitation with basic is that you can have a max of 4 volumes on any one drive whereas with dynamic you can more The reason for this is that on the basic, the disk partition table is a 64 bit file and you need 16 bits for each logical unit hence the max of 4.

You can convert basic to dynamic even with data on them yet all data must be deleted to go from dynamic to basic. It is fairly straight forward in the computer management snap-in under disk management.
 
Thanks Myopic! Matt Wray
CCNA, MCP
mwray77518@yahoo.com
 
Myoptic or anyone,
I have never had to recover from a Disk failure (knock on wood) but I would like to know what the steps are if I ever have to. I set up my clients machine with 2 IDE HDDs and are mirroring them. I have one as my master and one as my slave. Say one day I come in and the master drive is crashed. What would be my steps to get the clients machine up and running again?
Thanks in advance :>
 
Don't quote me on this, but I believe with a mirror you kill the mirror, replace the drive and recreate the mirror..Never done it, but I believe that is how its done.. Matt Wray
CCNA, MCP
mwray77518@yahoo.com
 
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