What Is Dynamic Disk

What Is Dynamic Disk?

Dynamic disk uses dynamic volumes to manage data. It is a separate form of volume management that allows one volume to have noncontiguous extents on one or more physical disks. Dynamic disks use a database to track information about all volumes on the disk as well as information about other dynamic disks, and the location of database is determined by partition style of the disk. On MBR partitions, the database is contained in the last 1 megabyte (MB) of the disk while database on GPT partitions is located in a 1MB reserved partition. In addition, each dynamic disk in a computer saves a copy of the database, so that Windows can repair a damaged database by using the database on other dynamic disks. 

On a dynamic disk, we can create 5 types of dynamic volumes to enhance computer performance, including simple volume, mirrored volume, striped volume, spanned volume, and RAID volume. A simple volume functions like primary partitions on basic disk; a mirrored volume provides fault tolerance by creating a copy of data contained in this volume; a striped volume improves disk input/output performance by distributing I/O requests across disks; a spanned volume combines spaces on 2 hard disks at least to a dynamic volume; A RAID-5 volume stripes data and parity across three or more disks. For more information about these volumes, please see Dynamic Disk. 

In Windows snap-in Disk Management utility, we are only allowed to extend simple volumes and spanned volumes except for the system and boot one or extend a mirrored volume after breaking the mirror. However, with a third party partitioning program we can extend any types of dynamic volumes.