Windows Vista™ Administrator's Pocket Consultant

Working with Basic and Dynamic Disks

Not that long ago, all Windows computers shipped with their hard disks configured as basic disks. Now, because people want larger or more robust disks, computer manufacturers have responded by increasingly shipping computers with their hard disks configured as dynamic disks. Instead of having a single 120 gigabyte (GB) drive, a new computer might have a spanned disk with 360 GB, where three 120 GB drives act as a single local disk. In this scenario, disk spanning is used to make multiple disks appear to be a single disk, and the primary way to implement this on Windows Vista is to use dynamic disks. In other words, you can no longer take for granted that a new computer (or any computer, for that matter) has ...