Dynamic Disk XP Pro

[Broken]

Anyone here use the dynamic disk option in XP Pro?
If so, did you see a reasonable increase in speed?

This seems like a great option that I have never tried!
But I want to ask those who have gone before.


I have 2 x 250gig WD PATA drives.

[peat moss]

Funny I'v never heard of it till I read your post and Googled it , found some interesting info here.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/c12621675.mspx

Dynamic Disks

A dynamic disk is a physical disk that contains dynamic volumes. Dynamic disks provide features that basic disks do not. For example, use dynamic disks if you need to:
•

Increase the size of a volume by extending the volume onto the same disk by using unallocated space that is not contiguous. You can also extend a volume onto other dynamic disks.
•

Improve disk input/output (I/O) performance by using striped volumes.

Dynamic disks offer greater flexibility for volume management because they use a hidden database to track information about dynamic volumes on the disk and about other dynamic disks in the computer. Because each dynamic disk in a computer stores a replica of the dynamic disk database, Windows XP Professional can repair a corrupted database on one dynamic disk by using the database on another dynamic disk.

[Broken]

The way i understand it is that it's Window's software RAID.
It requires nothing other than having two hard disk. I'm just not finding any information on the kind of improvement to expect.

[peat moss]

Well it seems like this is excellent idea ?


"Windows XP Professional can repair a corrupted database on one dynamic disk by using the database on another dynamic disk."



Or about striped volumes :

Using striped volumes

Striped volumes are created by combining areas of free space on two or more disks into one logical volume. Striped volumes use RAID-0, which stripes data across multiple disks. Striped volumes cannot be extended or mirrored, and do not offer fault tolerance. If one of the disks containing a striped volume fails, the entire volume fails. When creating striped volumes, it is best to use disks that are the same size, model, and manufacturer.

With a striped volume, data is divided into blocks and spread in a fixed order among all the disks in the array, similar to spanned volumes. Striping writes files across all disks so that data is added to all disks at the same rate.

Despite their lack of fault tolerance, striped volumes offer the best performance of all the Windows disk management strategies and provide increased I/O performance by distributing I/O requests across disks. For example, striped volumes offer improved performance when:
•

Reading from or writing to large databases.
•

Collecting data from external sources at very high transfer rates.
•

Loading program images, dynamic-link libraries (DLLs), or run-time libraries.

Link : http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library//2bdce9b3-c49f-480e-a6df-287bda357baf1033.mspx

[Broken]

I went ahead and set dynamic drives up.

On the positive side, thanks to the RAID 0 option,
I got about a 30% increase (very noticeable) on games and applications.

On the negative side,
because I now have one hard drive on each of the IDE ports my optical drives (also PATA) (DVD) are reading slower. However, my writer appears to still write to disk at a near normal rate.

All in all, if you have XP Pro installed and two HD's it's a good move.
It took me a few tries to get things going because of my not reading instructions fully.

[peat moss]

Hey live and learn Broken , have you thought of enabling your PM as I found some other sites but it would been redundant to post here . .