Performance Diff : Dynamic Disks vs Basic Disks

[USMC2Hard4U]

The Funny thing is, I never knew their was a diffence. Infact I didnt even know this existed.

what are some performance differences between the two?
What bennifits do I have?

I tried seaching google, and I can never understand the Microsoft knowledge database

 

[USMC2Hard4U]

Anyone?

 

[DougLite]

From a performance standpoint, to my knowledge, no. The purposes of Dynamic Disks are:

A) Enabling creation and management of multi drive arrays using WIndows software.
B) Allowing drives and capacity to be brought online without rebooting the computer.
C) Allows for space to be added to any volume on a dynamic disk using unallocated space on any dynamic disk in the system.

Dynamic disks allow you to span volumes (and drive letters) across multiple dynamic disks, allowing you the user to see a bunch of drives as one single volume with a single drive letter, like JBOD RAID. You may also stripe dynamic disks in software, like hardware RAID-0.

If you have access to a MS Server Product of 2000 or above, you may also create mirrored volumes, like software RAID-1, and 'RAID-5' volumes, which is like well, uhhh, RAID-5 in software, managed by the Windows Operating System.

Ice Czar will no doubt post some links to more data on dynamic disks, like he always does, and he will most likely tell you not to fool with them, as I am. Here's some of the more prominent limitations, quick and dirty:

1) You cannot install Windows on a multi drive dynamic volume (you may mirror server boot volumes though), and you cannot later span a boot volume to another dynamic disk.
2) You cannot extend volumes that were created as partitions on a basic disk, so extending boot volumes is out (you create your boot volume during the setup program as a basic disk)
3) Only simple and spanned volumes can be expanded on the fly - striped, RAID-5, and mirrored volumes must be backed up, deleted, and recreated in the new size.
4) Dynamic disks are not supported on laptops, or on mobile (USB/Firewire) drives.
5) Dynamic disks are not readable on any OS other than Win 2K+
6) Officially, all volumes (and data ) on a dynamic disk must be deleted before it may be reverted back to a basic disk, although there is a hack to get around this if you need to recover a dyanamic disk that only has simple volumes on it - check out this thread - Thanks Feigned!

Dynamic disks, in a nutshell = software RAID, with some fancy on-the-fly/hotplug stuff thrown in. Recovering an installation on a dynamic disk can be a real pain, and some very weird, apparently inexplicible, things can happen to dynamic disks. As much as MS pushes dynamic disks, remember that they themselves state that dynamic storage is only for a handful of situations that require the on-the-fly expansion and drive swapping features, and that basic disks remain the recommended storage system for most users, even straight from MS. I would stay away from Dynamic Disks. BTW, to answer "what are some performance differences between the two?" - None. In fact, a bootable dynamic disk still has a master boot record that points to the boot volume AND the dynamic database at the end of the disk, so they are really not that different.