Dynamic vs Basic Disk - Hard Drives

Question

I have bought a removable hard drive enclosure and a 1TB hard drive to fit in it. Its pretty cool; it has a little handle at the front of the caddy that allows you to take out the hard drive and stick into another caddy - or swap it for another hard drive, whatever you choose.

The manual talks about converting your dynamic disk to a basic disk if you want the ability to be able to use the "Swap Manager" software (some 3rd party software to allow swapping out of hard drives).

Can anyone explain to what the pros and cons are of having a basic vs dynamic HD?

Answer 1

Basic is just that - a basic disk, you can remove and add it as will.

Dynamic disk is an enhanced partition table in Windows that enables enhanced features such as software raid. However, In Windows XP it only works in Professional, and I guess it is also locked out of the home editions of Vista/7 (although not tested).

Also, every time you want to use it on a new computer, or even if you just remove and put it in, you will have to manually import the disk.

Personally, unless this is very good software or it has very big benefits, I would leave it is a basic disk - I deal with many removable disks and I use basic on all of them.

Answer 2

Main advantage of basic partitions is 3rd party software support.

Main advantage of dynamic partitions is that Vista/Windows7 can manage partitions (create/expand/contract) more easily. The built-in functionality sometime fails badly on static disks (e.g. shows that there's enough contiguous free space but refuses to shrink or create a partition).

Answer 3

I don't know any benefits of dynamic disks that outweigh the minuses — namely, severely limited 3rd party disk utility and data recovery software. In my experience dynamic disks are a world of pain.

Answer 4

For Basic Disks and Dynamic Disks, they have their own differences and similarity. Here is a complete article to compare them through several aspects on: http://www.dynamic-disk.com/difference-between-basic-and-dynamic-disk.html, you could know it.

Answer 5

Basic disks are simple to use with windows. Dynamic disks are a lot of pain. The advantages of dynamic disks are few. In fact Dynamic disks cannot be selected for installing windows (including windows 8 as of now) which is a serious disadvantage. Every time u want to install windows to a dynamic disk you are gonna convert it to basic and reconvert to dynamic after installing windows.