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Win2k3 Dynamic Disk question

M

mobiux

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On my current file server, I have a couple drives, each formatted as different drive letters, and users mapping to them as different drive letters.

I am running out of space on one of the drives and would like to add more space, but don't want to spring for a larger drive, I would just like to add another drive I have available.

So, In win2k3, can you convert a standard disk to dynamic disk without losing all the data on the original? Since the existing data is roughly 275 GB, restoring could take quite a while.
 
According to all MS literature that I have read, you can convert form Basic to Dynamic and have a high likelihood of no data loss. You cannot convert from Dynamic to basic without losing data.
 
back up back up back up. Anytime you do any high level work on a drive, you need to back up. If you aren't prepared to backup, don't bother with the work, because according to murphy, that's the time the system will puke.

Trust me on this.
 
From experience, yes you can convert it with out losing data. The problem is that any non-dynamically created partition can not be modified. In order to get the benifits of a dynamic partition, that partition must have been created after the drive was converted.

Your best way to accomplish your task would be to back up the data, convert the drive, recreate the partition how you need it, then restore the data.
 
I've done the conversion before and the data was still intact, however I would also recommend you backup the data before doing anything. I'm not so sure though that you'd actually have to create the partition after converting to Dynamic Disk before getting the benefits from it, because that means you wouldn't be able to benefit from having Dynamic Disk on your boot drive, since there would be no way to convert it prior to installing the OS.

The big thing to keep in mind here that spanning will slow down the speed of that volume, and spanning does not have any sort of redundancy. So if something happens to one of the drives, your entire volume will be lost; both drives would be hosed. You're really better off getting a bigger drive, but if you REALLY don't want to do that, then backup your data and span away. Just make sure to do even more frequent backups than you have been doing.
 
chalkspray said:
I've done the conversion before and the data was still intact, however I would also recommend you backup the data before doing anything. I'm not so sure though that you'd actually have to create the partition after converting to Dynamic Disk before getting the benefits from it, because that means you wouldn't be able to benefit from having Dynamic Disk on your boot drive, since there would be no way to convert it prior to installing the OS.

The big thing to keep in mind here that spanning will slow down the speed of that volume, and spanning does not have any sort of redundancy. So if something happens to one of the drives, your entire volume will be lost; both drives would be hosed. You're really better off getting a bigger drive, but if you REALLY don't want to do that, then backup your data and span away. Just make sure to do even more frequent backups than you have been doing.
Click to expand...
No, you can't have a dynamic system partition. Also, spanning doesn't slow down performance as it's not a stripping technology. There might be a minute perforamnce impact on a file that bridges the span, but only one file could do that. A stripping (with or with out parity) technology would slightly decrease performance as that would need to be processed by the processor. But, that is usually negated by increas throughput of the from the drives.

This should help: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/ar...ved-Converting-Basic-Disks-Dynamic-Disks.html
"If a volume was originally a partition on a basic disk then that volume can not be extended or spanned. Only volumes that are created on dynamic disks can be extended or spanned."
 
MorfiusX said:
No, you can't have a dynamic system partition. Also, spanning doesn't slow down performance as it's not a stripping technology. There might be a minute perforamnce impact on a file that bridges the span, but only one file could do that. A stripping (with or with out parity) technology would slightly decrease performance as that would need to be processed by the processor. But, that is usually negated by increas throughput of the from the drives.

This should help: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/ar...ved-Converting-Basic-Disks-Dynamic-Disks.html
"If a volume was originally a partition on a basic disk then that volume can not be extended or spanned. Only volumes that are created on dynamic disks can be extended or spanned."
Click to expand...

diskpart can extend basic disks/partitions into unallocated space on a drive (useful in a SAN scenario when you extend the LUN).
 
He's not using unused space on the single disk though, he wants to span onto another disk. Diskpart is a good tool though, just not for this situation.
 
MorfiusX said:
No, you can't have a dynamic system partition. Also, spanning doesn't slow down performance as it's not a stripping technology. There might be a minute perforamnce impact on a file that bridges the span, but only one file could do that. A stripping (with or with out parity) technology would slightly decrease performance as that would need to be processed by the processor. But, that is usually negated by increas throughput of the from the drives.

This should help: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/ar...ved-Converting-Basic-Disks-Dynamic-Disks.html
"If a volume was originally a partition on a basic disk then that volume can not be extended or spanned. Only volumes that are created on dynamic disks can be extended or spanned."
Click to expand...

Striping DOES NOT slow down performance! Striping INCREASES performance; that's the whole point of striping! The idea is that a chunk of each file is written to each of the drives in a striped volume, so each drive only has to write a small percentage of the file, thus reducing its utilization. Furthermore, a RAID 5 volume with at least 3 drives includes parity information for redundancy in the case of a hard drive failure.

You may be correct in that you cannot span a volume if the partition was created prior to converting the disk to dynamic disk, but I do know for a fact that you can convert a disk to dynamic disk and then mirror the volume (between two drives) even if it was created prior to the disk being upgraded to dynamic disk. I've done this several times. So the statement that the partition cannot take advantage of dynamic disk unless it was created after the upgrade is not totally correct. The last time I spanned a volume was a long time ago though, because of the speed and redundancy issues involved with spanning.

Also, the drive that a system partition is on CAN be converted to dynamic disk; I have done this several times. I have also made the system partition part of a mirrored volume in the past, so I KNOW that that statement is not correct.

Whatever you do, just keep these two things in mind: You will lose the data on all drives in a spanned volume if one of the drives fails. Spanning is the slowest of all RAID volumes (other than mirroring in most cases)
 
Mirroring is the only dynamic thing you can do to a system partition (not disk). You can not stripe it. You can not use RAID 5 on it. So, yes my original statement was not as clear as it could have been.

Calculations of the striping (and parity in RAID 5) in a dynamic partition are done by the CPU. So, in theory, there is a performance decrease associated with that. Can you notice it? No. This was the point I was trying to make.

Also, spanning is not a RAID technology.
 
Technically any drive volume that does not have redundancy is not using RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks), but Spanning has sometimes been grouped in there with the rest of those technologies. It all depends on how you look at it though - A lot of people would inadvertantly call spanning a RAID technology since it groups two or more drives together to make one volume. By the book though, you are right, spanning is not RAID.
 
We should also point out that when using a Hardware RAID controller, the system partition can be part of a striped volume. It's just that Windows does not have this capability.
 
IIRC, you cannot convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk unless there is at least 1MB of un-partitioned unallocated space for the dynamic disk database.
So if the partition on the basic disk uses the whole drive you can’t make it dynamic.
If the drive was originally partitioned with the disk management MMC then it should have the necessary free space.
If it was created with FDISK or some other OS then chances are it does not.
You would have to use something like Partition Magic to free up that space and then you risk the chance of losing data, back it up first and then try it!!

Spanning Dynamic Volumes is not RAID, and will not increase performance.
Stripping splits the file amongst the drives increasing read/write speeds, spanning writes the whole file to the first drive in the chain until it is full then writes to the second drive and so on.

RAID 5 will only increase read speeds.
It will not increase write speeds because of the parity information that is being calculated and then written, this slows down the write speed to the drive.
 
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