Choosing Basic or Dynamic Disks

Traditional hard disks are called basic disks in Windows Vista and Windows 7, and they have the same functionality that basic disks have always had, plus a few extras. You can create new partitions (called simple volumes in Windows Vista and Windows 7), delete partitions, and extend or shrink the existing partitions. The ability to extend or shrink an existing partition is an important new feature in Windows Vista and continues to be supported in Windows 7.

Dynamic disks, first introduced in Microsoft Windows 2000, provide all of the functionality of the basic disk, plus the ability to span a volume across multiple dynamic disks or stripe multiple dynamic disks to create a larger (and faster) volume. Dynamic disks present difficulties, however, because they are not accessible from operating systems other than the operating system instance that converted the disk to dynamic. This makes dynamic disks inaccessible in multiboot environments and makes recovering data more difficult in the event of partial hard disk failure. You should always use basic disks unless you have a specific requirement that can be met only by dynamic disks.