Dynamic vs Basic Discs

[zs450]

I actually have two questions in this post. The first, what advantage (other than RAID) is there to converting hard drives to dynamic discs right now? I've got an XP x64 PC with a couple of drives in it and I've tried both Basic and Dynamic discs for the OS and haven't noticed a bit of differnce. Is there really any reason that I should feel compelled to convert my basic discs to dynamic right now? I don't have a RAID set up in the machine and don't intend to create one.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[rvnguy]

Dynamic disk status is basically a tabling schema that adds a bit of overhead but as you stated is required for RAID.

If RAID is part of your install, I would not recommend using it. Stay Basic...but do backup often either way.

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[zs450]

Thanks, I've heard so many great things about dynamic discs that I thought that I was missing something. Maybe it's something that matters in Vista (some of the great words are from developers).

 

[rvnguy]

This might explain a bit:

Basic Disks
Basic disks store their configuration information in the master boot record (MBR), which is stored on the first sector of the disk. The configuration of a Basic disk consists of the partition information on the disk. Basic Fault Tolerant sets inherited from Windows NT 4.0 are based on these simple partitions, but they extend the configuration with some simple partition relationship information, which is stored on the first track of the disk.
Dynamic Disks
Dynamic disks are associated with Disk Groups. A Disk Group is a collection of disks managed as a collection. Each disk in a Disk Group stores replicas of the same configuration data. This configuration data is stored in a 1 megabyte (MB) region at the end of each Dynamic disk.

The information for Simple, Mirrored, RAID-5, Striped, or Spanned volumes is contained in a private database that is stored at the end of each Dynamic Disk. Each private database replicates across all Dynamic Disks for fault tolerance. Since the information about the disks is contained on the disks, you can move the disk to another computer or install another disk without losing this information. All Dynamic Disks in a computer are members of the same Disk Group.

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[zs450]

Thanks again. I appreciate your help on the two posts.