Operation Manual

For more information about disk groups please refer to the following Microsoft knowledge base

article:

222189 Description of Disk Groups in Windows Disk Management

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222189/EN-US/

Disk type

The type of disk, which is determined by the way the disk is organized.

A disk has one of two types: basic disk (p. 68) or dynamic disk (p. 71).

Drive

A physical device for accessing information on a disk (p. 70).

Examples of drives include hard disk drives (p. 73) and floppy disk drives.

Drive letter

See Volume letter (p. 79).

Dynamic disk

A hard disk that is managed by Logical Disk Manager (LDM), which is available in Windows starting

with Windows 2000.

Use of LDM helps to flexibly allocate volumes on a disk for fault tolerance, better performance or

larger volume size.

A dynamic disk can use either the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT)

partitioning scheme (p. 76).

Each dynamic disk has a hidden database where the LDM stores the configuration of all dynamic

volumes existing in the disk group, which makes for better storage reliability. On an MBR disk, this

database occupies the last 1 MB of the disk. On a GPT disk, Windows creates the dedicated LDM

Metadata partition, taking space from the Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR.)

Disk 1

MBR

LDM

database

1 MB

Disk 2

Protecti

MBR

GPT

Microsoft

Reserved

Partition (MSR)

LDM

database

GPT

LDM Metadata

partition

1 MB

A dynamic MBR disk (Disk 1) and a dynamic GPT disk (Disk 2).

For more information about dynamic disks please refer to the following Microsoft knowledge base

articles: