Acronis Resource Center

The Essence of Dynamic Storage And How You Can Use It

Dynamic storage is still just a bit cliquish — if you don't have the right version of Windows, you can't use it. Dynamic storage is only available on Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional. Windows XP Home Edition and older versions of the operating system, such as Windows 98 and Windows NT, simply don't have the feature.

Dynamic Storage is a storage virtualization tool that creates Dynamic Disks out of available disk space. What's a "dynamic disk" you ask? Good question.

If you've got the option, Dynamic Storage is a handy feature. Most large businesses use dynamic storage because of its advantages when you have a lot of disks and a lot of disk space to manage.

The biggest problem with Dynamic Storage is its incompatibility with other versions of Windows. In order to perform their magic, Dynamic Disks use a different method of organizing space on physical disks, a method that other versions of Windows can't interpret. Versions other than Windows 2000 and XP professional cannot access information on a Dynamic Disk and once a disk is converted to a Dynamic Disk it can't be easily converted back to basic disk partitions.

However Dynamic Disks can co-exist on a system with basic disks. The only limitation is that you can't mix Basic and Dynamic disks on the same hard drive.

Basic storage is especially important if you need to maintain compatibility with older systems like Windows 98 and Windows NT. If you only have a single physical hard disk, Dynamic Storage doesn't get you much. However the more physical disks you have and the more complex your setup, the more you can benefit from Dynamic Disks.