Dynamic Disk VS Basic Disk: Convert Basic to Dynamic/Dynamic to Basic Disk

Dynamic disk VS basic disk

There are two types of hard drive configurations most commonly used in the Windows system: dynamic disk and basic disk. They own different features, which decide their different way of organizing files and folders.

In the post, let’s learn about what is dynamic disk and basic disk, and how to convert between them.

■ Basic disk

A basic disk is a kind of physical disk, which can be visited by all Windows systems and MS-DOS. It is the most common disk type used in Windows OS. When you initialize a hard disk on your computer, it would initially set up as a basic disk.

A basic disk supports MBR and GPT partition style, and it manages data on a disk with primary partitions, extended partitions and logical partition. You can create logical drives in extended partitions and resize/delete/ extend/ format partitions in basic disk. But all those operations are confined in one disk.

■ Dynamic disk

Unlike the basic disk, the dynamic disk uses LDM (logical disk manager) or VDS (virtual disk service) to manage all partitions, and it can also support MBR and GPT partition tables.

And a dynamic disk allows you to resize its volumes and transfer space from one drive to another. And you can share data among disk to prevent data damage or loss. Besides, more types of volumes can be recreated in a dynamic disk, including simple volumes, spanned volumes, striped volumes, mirrored volumes, and RAID-5 volumes.

• Simple volume: Just like the basic partition.
• Spanned volume: With spanned volume, you can merge multiple unallocated spaces from different physical disks into one logical volume.
• Striped volume: Striped volumes are composed of equal spaces from two or more disks. Its data are distributed in multiple disks. And it distributes I/O requests among disks to improve disk performance.
• Mirrored volume: It can create a copy of data in a mirrored volume, which means it could be used for fault tolerance.
• RAID-5 volume: RAID 5 is a redundant array of independent disks that uses disk striping with parity.

The next table makes a brief summary of the differences between dynamic disk and basic disk. You can take a quick glimpse at it.

From the “dynamic disk versus basic disk” table, we can know the different features between them, and you may want to convert disk between dynamic and basic disk. Here, we are going to demonstrate to you how to perform the basic-to-dynamic and dynamic-to-basic conversion.

Note: Before the operation, you would better backup the disk in case of data loss.

How to convert Basic disk to dynamic disk?

Many people want to change basic disk to dynamic disk, because a dynamic disk is more flexible. And you can do it in Disk Management. Here are the steps.

Step 1. Right-click “The PC” or “My Computer” and click “Manage”.

Step 2. Click the “Disk Management” on the left window, right-click the basic you want to convert to dynamic disk.

And wait for the disk converted to be dynamic disk.

Note: But sometimes, you should not convert basic to a dynamic disk. For example, in some operating systems like Windows 7, Windows XP, a dynamic disk can’t be read. If you run into some problems after this operation, you can follow the next content to learn dynamic-to-basic conversion.

How to convert dynamic disk to basic disk without losing data?

You can also convert dynamic disk to basic disk in Disk Management, but using DM is not recommended here, because you need to delete all the dynamic volumes during the operation, and will lose all the data on the disk. Is there any method to convert disk without data loss?

Yes, there is a method to do so without losing data, click here to known details:dynamic disk and basic disk