hey guys. i installed windowsxp and i decided to turn my hard disk from basic to dynamic. i like the ability to mount/unmount stuff but i can't see an advantage of using dynamic disks. the fact that i can manage dynamic disks on the fly and don't have to worry about 3rd party progs like partition magic is nice but i don't see myself mounting/unmounting often. does anyone know of an advantage that dynamic disks have over basic that would prove its worth? based on what i've read dynamic disks are better suited for large storage and server environments.

Dynamic disks allow for such features as disk spanning and disk striping (software RAID-0 type solution). Volumes that were created as dynamic disks can also be expanded.

that is true, but i only have 1 hard disk so i couldn't setup any sort of RAID configuration. but i'm definitely gonna keep my current config the way it is because dynamic disks seem much better than basic disks.

Dynamic disks should ONLY be used when actually using the windows RAID solutions like striping, spanning, etc, like patrickd said.
a friend of mine had one of his disks set up as dynamic for ages, he formatted and went back to basic and got a big performance increase. As far as i know, u shouldn't be using then unless you are using the raid features. There's just no point...

That isn't true. Think of it this way; what if you had a 10GB drive to install your OS on, and you wanted to make that your system drive. Now, you want to store another 10GB of MP3s, your Games folder is looking a bit big, and you are simply running out of space BUT you don't want to add the extra drive letters since your existing games are already installed to "c:\Games\blah...". Well, you can pick up a 60GB drive and answer both your space issues and your drive path issues with dynamic disks. Simply mount the new drive to a folder on your existing one, and you are set. You can have several drives all mounted to your system drive, and not have to keep any drive letters straight. It does work pretty well, but I use servers anyway so there isn't much of an issue for local storage (and I have a 100GB drive in my main box too, so that doesn't hurt).

yea, that whole spanned volumes thing is a pretty funky little bonus, but speed-wise is it really worth it? I mean, as is usual i am probably wrong but i have heard that they perform a bit slower as a dynamic disk.

You don't need dynamic disks for mounting a volume in a folder, I have basic drives and am doing this as we speak w/ my c:\program files folder. The only limitation that I am aware of is that the folder in which you are mounting the drive in *must* reside on an NTFS partition.

Dynamic disks are better suited for server type environments. In a windows 2000 or xp professional setup, the only options you have are simple volume, spanned volume, or striped volume. Keep in mind that only Windows 2000 and XP can use dynamic disks.

Simple volume - The building blocks of a dynamic disk setup, a simple volume is most comparable to a partition. It offers you the ability to tack another simple volume onto it and make a larger volume, in this process it becomes a spanned volume. I don't know about ever removing the added volume though without reformatting.

Spanned volume - Spanned volumes are as explained above, created when you lump 2 or more simple volumes together to create one logical volume. NOTE: You can NOT create a spanned volume using a partition that was upgraded to a simple volume, i.e. boot and system partitions.

Striped volume - RAID-0. No redundancy here, just increased STR. This will also slightly slow down your seek times as you are seeking 2 separate physical drives here. This will give you performance roughly equal to a RAID-0 setup on a Promise or comparable IDE RAID card. If the RAID card has a dedicated chip on it though, or if you use more than 2 drives, go w/ an add-on board. Only limitation is that you can't create a RAID-0 boot partition.

You can also check out this MS KB article for more info... link

Were the volumes that you were mounting themselves Dynamic? Because that was what I was referring to, and I cannot mount my other partitions even though they are NTFS. When I was at an Intro to Windows 2000 class a while back, they had use run through this drill and we *had* to convert to Dynamic first before we could mount the partition to any other NTFS partition. But if this isn't (or is no longer) the case, then please let me know.

I use simple (NOT dynamic) and am able to mount partitions in NTFS folders under XP. So you don't need dynamic, at least under XP...

I have no dynamic disks on my PC.

Running Windows 2000 SP2, but have done this even before service packs were released w/ no problem

It must have been since we were using Beta 3 of Adv Server, and we were advised that this behavior would carry over into the full OS. I tried it on this workstation and the option is still greyed out (WinXP Pro), but it's something that I haven't bothered with in quite a while. I might fiddle with it on my test box at home later.

I have a hard drive that i partitioned. The system partition is too small so i keep getting out of space messages. Can i make one of the larger empty partitions a dynamic drive and "combine it with the system partition?