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== An Overview of Dynamic Disks ==
As covered in the preceding chapters, basic disks allow partitions to be created on a physical disks disk which are subsequently formatted with a particular file system and then used to store data. Whilst the partitions on a basic disk can be increased in size this can be achieved within the confines of the space available on the physical disk on which they reside.
Dynamic disks bring significantly more flexibility into the creation and management of volumes both in terms of space management, performance and redundancy. There are five types of dynamic volume which can be created through the use of dynamic disks:
Windows Server 2008 allows basic disks to be converted to dynamic disks using the Disk Management interface. Before covering the steps to perform such a conversion there are a number of rules which need to be observed.
In the first instance, MBR disks must have at least 1Mb 1MB of free space at the end of the disk where the dynamic disk database will be stored. Both Disk Management and ''diskpart '' allocate this space automatically so this will only be a problem if the disk was partitioned using a third party tool or a n oder an older version of Windows.
GPT disks can only be converted if they have contiguous, Windows compatible partitions. It is not, for example, possible to convert a basic GPT disk containing one or more Linux partitions to a dynamic disk.
