Disks formatted with the Windows NT Server 4.0 operating system are referred to as basic disks and continue to be supported by Windows 2000. In addition, for compatibility with legacy systems, Windows 2000 based disks are initialized to use the basic storage system. Basic disks are divided into areas called partitions, which function as physically separate areas of storage. Each basic disk can be divided into a maximum of four partitions. Windows 2000 introduces the dynamic disks described in this article, which can be extended, added, deleted, mirrored and repaired online.
Administrators can upgrade basic disks to the dynamic format.
Dynamic management uses a more flexible system of volumes rather than the partition-based management system used with basic storage. Dynamic volumes can consist of just a portion of a physical disk, an entire disk, or they can span multiple disks. This kind of flexibility makes it much easier to set up and rearrange disk resources to meet your changing storage requirements. For example, if you see that a shared disk volume is running short on space, you can expand the volume to include space on another disk. As mentioned earlier, you can do all these tasks without rebooting the server or putting volumes offline.