H/W RAID 5 array - Basic or Dynamic?

[Flapjack]

So after much fussing and fighting, I finally got my RAID 5 array of five 1TB drives working. I'm running Win7-x64 and the drives are in a SanDisk TR5M tower connected via eSATA to a Silicon Image SII 3132 PCI card.

Since the array is hosting mostly large video files (DVD/BD rips, primarly), I used the largest chunk size available (128K).

Now the 4TB is showing up under Windows Disk Management. Should I leave the disk "Basic" or convert it to a "Dynamic" disk?

This is my first time with hardware RAID (other than SCSI) so I'm not 100% sure what to do. I know with Win2k3 and Win2k8, software RAID requires the disks to be in dynamic mode before you can create the array. But since the array is already built in hardware, does switching to dynamic mode hurt/help?

 

[Flapjack]

I may have found the answer, though not exactly at the level of detail I was hoping for (on TechNet, of all places):

Overview of Disk Management
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd163558.aspx

Sounds pretty much just like I said before. Going to a dynamic disk gives you more flexibility (eg: software RAID), which is unneeded if I already have hardware RAID. In addition, it makes data recovery more difficult.

Real World: Dynamic versus Basic Disks

We used to be big fans of dynamic disks. They provided increased flexibility and functionality in a way that was pretty transparent. And they were a huge step forward when they were introduced in Windows 2000. At the time, RAID controllers were both more expensive and less functional, and many servers didn't have hardware RAID on them. That's simply not the case anymore.

If using dynamic disks increases your options, isn't that a good thing? Well, yes. But. And it's a big but. A dynamic disk complicates the disaster recovery process, and we dislike anything that creates potential issues in a disaster recovery scenario. We definitely don't think dynamic disks are appropriate for a system disk. And we just have a hard time seeing where the upside is given the functionality that your RAID controller or SAN array management application provides.

If you do find a need that can't be solved any other way, then by all means use dynamic disks. There's no apparent performance cost, and you use the same tools to manage both dynamic disks in Windows Server 2008 and basic disks. But avoid converting your system disk to dynamic. And make sure your disaster recovery procedures are updated appropriately.

 

[Flapjack]

EDIT
Whoops. Wrong thread.