Saturday, December 17, 2016

Detailed differences Between Basic And Dynamic Disks


Detailed differences Between Basic And Dynamic Disks

·         Essential difference
- Basic Disks uses a Partition Table to manage all partitions on the basic disk.
- Dynamic Disks use a hidden LDM database to manage all volumes on the dynamic disk.
·         Support for each Windows
Basic Disks is supported by all Windows and include MSDOS,Win95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/2008/Vista/Windows 7, 8.
Dynamic Disks is supported by Win2000/XP/2003/2008/2011/2012/Vista and Windows 7/8, but isn't supported by MSDOS, Win95/98/Me/NT and Windows XP Home Edition.
·         Change capacity for partitions
Basic Disks once create a partition, you cannot change its capacity, unless use third-party tools.
Dynamic Disks without restarting system expand the capacity of volumes, and don’t loss of data.
·         Disk space limited
Basic Disks, the maximum capacity of a partition (volume) can be limited to 2TB.
Dynamic Disks can well handle the large partition of more than 2TB.
·         The number of partitions
Basic Disks, at most can have 4 the primary partition, and usually the best is 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition.
Dynamic Disks, you can create unlimited number of partitions.
·         Volumes type
Basic Disks only can create any primary or logical partition.
Dynamic Disks can create simple volume, spanned volume, striped volume, mirrored volume and RAID-5 volume.
·         Mutual convertibility
Basic Disks can easily convert to a dynamic disk without any losing-data. Do not even need to restart the computer during the conversion.
Dynamic Disks convert to a basic disk, which need to delete all volumes on the dynamic disk, unless use third-party tools such as
 Dynamic Disk Converter.
·         Installation operating system
Basic Disks, any operating system can be installed to a basic disk.
Dynamic Disks, for the moment, all operating system can't be installed to a dynamic disk.

Similarity

·         Supported file systems
Basic Disks and Dynamic Disks all support FAT, FAT32 and NTFS file systems. May be in individual operating systems, cannot directly create a FAT32 dynamic volume, but after creating a NTFS dynamic volume, you could re-format it as FAT32.
·         Have a partition table
Dynamic Disks have a partition table too, but this partition table is not the same as one of Basic Disk. Its main function is to let Windows and Other Partition Manager can know the disk is a dynamic disk instead of an empty disk.
·         Label and Drive Letter
On Basic Disks and Dynamic Disks, you can set label and assign drive letter for all volumes or partitions such as "system (C:)".
·         Adjust partition size for Vista and later OS
Both Basic Disks and Dynamic Disks, you can extend and shrink the partitions (volumes) size, but don't move its location for any partitions in Vista/2008 and Windows 7, 8.
·         Convert file system from FAT to NTFS
If your partitions (volumes) are a FAT file system, you could convert FAT (FAT32) to NTFS by using "convert C: /FS:NTFS" in command line.


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