Working with basic, dynamic, and virtual disks
Windows Server 2012 R2 supports basic, dynamic, and virtual disk configurations. This section discusses techniques for working with each disk configuration type.
Using basic and dynamic disks
Basic, dynamic, and virtual disk configurations can be used with both legacy storage approaches and standards-based storage. Normally, Windows Server 2012 R2 disk partitions are initialized as basic disks. The exception is when you want to use software-based RAID instead of standards-based storage.
With software-based RAID, you can’t create new fault-tolerant drive sets by using the basic disk type. You need to convert to dynamic disks and then create volumes that use striping, mirroring, or striping with parity (referred to as RAID 0, 1, and 5, respectively). The fault-tolerant features and the ability to modify disks without having to restart the computer are the key capabilities that distinguish dynamic disks from basic disks. Other features available on a disk depend on the disk formatting.
You can use both basic and dynamic disks on the same computer; however, volume sets must use the same disk type and partitioning style. For example, if you want to mirror drives C and D, both drives must have the dynamic disk type and use the same partitioning style, which can be either MBR or GPT. Note that Disk Management allows you to start many disk configuration tasks regardless of whether the disks with which you are working use the dynamic disk type. The catch is that during the configuration process, Disk Management will convert the disks to the dynamic disk type. To learn how to convert a disk from basic to dynamic, see “Changing drive types” on the next page.
You can perform different disk configuration tasks with basic and dynamic disks. With basic disks, you can do the following:
■ Format partitions, and mark them as active
■ Create and delete primary and extended partitions
■ Create and delete logical drives within extended partitions
■ Convert from a basic disk to a dynamic disk With dynamic disks, you can do the following:
■ Create and delete simple, striped, spanned, mirrored, and RAID-5 volumes
■ Remove a mirror from a mirrored volume
■ Extend simple or spanned volumes
■ Split a volume into two volumes
■ Repair mirrored or RAID-5 volumes
■ Reactivate a missing or offline disk
■ Revert to a basic disk from a dynamic disk (requires deleting volumes and restoring from backup)
With either disk type, you can do the following:
■ View properties of disks, partitions, and volumes
■ Make drive-letter assignments
■ Configure security and drive sharing
■ Use Storage Spaces to implement standards-based storage
Special considerations for basic and dynamic disks
Whether you’re working with basic or dynamic disks, you need to keep in mind five
special types of drive sections:
■ Active The active partition or volume is the drive section for system caching and startup. Some devices with removable storage might be listed as having an active partition.
■ Boot The boot partition or volume contains the operating system and its support files. The system and boot partition or volume can be the same.
■ Crash dump The partition to which the computer attempts to write dump files in the event of a system crash. By default, dump files are written to the %SystemRoot% folder, but they can be located on any partition or volume.
■ Page file A partition containing a paging file used by the operating system. Because a computer can page memory to multiple disks, according to the way virtual memory is configured, a computer can have multiple page file partitions or volumes.
■ System The system partition or volume contains the hardware-specific files needed to load the operating system. The system partition or volume can’t be part of a striped or spanned volume.