Dynamic or Basic?

[Paul]

I have a Pentium-4 /3.40 GHZ ( hyperthreading) with 1.00GB of RAM
running Windows-XP Professional that I use for Video editing.

I have 4 huge SATA hard drives installed (all of them NTFS file system). ,
and just one of them shows as "Dynamic" in the Disk management console,
the rest figures as "Basic".

Question:

Should I convert the Basic disks to Dynamic, or the Dynamic
one to basic? What is the best for handle large video
files in Windows-XP?

Thanks in advance.

Paul

 

[S.Sengupta]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343/EN-US/
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309000
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308424

regards,
ssg MS-MVP

 

[Mike Kolitz]

Basic disks are probably your best bet. Dynamic disks are really only
useful if you plan to create a fault-tolerant disk set with RAID-5, striping
or mirroring.

http://www.winnetmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=8619

 

[SlowJet]

The main themes for Dynaic disks are security, logical volumes(no 4 primary
partition limit, allocate as needed, delete and reuse as needed.), disk and
volume sets Idetification when moved to another machine or when a disk is
replaced, and volume extention on to other disks.

For large files on a large continuous partition it will make no difference
except when the file(s) become part of a share, then having the Dynnamic
disk would be a better choice for security and to exchange the Drive Letter
for a unc(? //server/volume/folder/file)

For best of both worlds on Windows XP Pro, go with Dynaic but don't expect
to be using old tools on the disks. XP CD SP2 SS and Disk manager only,
period, and follow instruction for moving volumes(disks) sets to another
machine or replacing a disk.)


SJ.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Should I convert the Basic disks to Dynamic, or the Dynamic
one to basic? What is the best for handle large video
files in Windows-XP?

I would use dynamic *only* if I wanted to handle two or more drives as
if they were a single entity. Common usage on Servers, but for a stand
alone machine stick to basic unless you are setting them up as a RAID
array

 

[Paul]

Many thanks to Sengupta, Mike, Slow Jet, and Alex.

I have already converted my dynamic disks to Basic and
everything is working just fine.

Regards,
Paul