Introduction to the disk types for Windows Storage Management

After the various operating systems are connected to the storage system, and the operating system recognizes the physical disks, the disks need to be further configured. If the user is connected to storage that is Windows Server, the storage administrator is bound to need to understand the disk type in Windows with the file system. The author summarizes the characteristics of Windows disk and partition type from the storage angle, and introduces and analyzes the contents, which helps the administrator to better understand the storage and file system of Windows host connection.

Disk type for Windows:

The physical disk types of windows are divided into two kinds:

Basic Disk – This type of physical disk can be accessed by MS-DOS and all Windows operating systems. Basic disk can include up to four primary partitions (Primary Partition), or logical disks (Logical disk) for three primary partitions and one extended partition (Extended Partition). Basic does not support fault tolerance, and you can create disks in MBR and GPT.

Dynamic Disk –dynamic Disk provides some functionality that basic disk does not have, such as extending a logical volume over multiple physical disks. Dynamic disk uses a hidden database to maintain a virtual volume on a bit physical disk. If a user needs to extend a logical disk to multiple physical disks, the Windows Disk Management and Diskpart.ext tools are required to first convert basic disk to dynamic disk. Dynamic disk supports online creation (restart required) and online expansion of logical volumes. Multiple copies of the metadata are stored on disk. Simplify management with soft raid capabilities, Mirror, spanned, and more.

Partition type for Windows disks:

When it comes to disk architecture, it's important to understand the following two concepts MBR and GPT.

MBR (Master Boot Record) The first sector on the physical disk (Sector), also known as the primary boot sector, is the first sector that must be read when accessing the disk after the computer card machine, which is located at cylinder 0, head 0, Sector 1. The MBR disks of Windows are divided into contiguous zones called partitions (Partition), and the information for each partition is stored in the MBR, the first sector of the disk, where the partition's starting position and length are defined in the MBR. Only one primary partition can be activated, and the operating system boot is supported.

GPT (GUID Partition Table) a disk partitioning scheme used by the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) in an Itanium-based computer.   GPT has a number of advantages over the master boot record (MBR) partitioning method because it allows up to 128 partitions per disk, theoretically supporting the maximum size of the EB volume, allowing the primary and backup disk partition tables to be used for redundancy, and also supporting unique disk and partition IDs (GUIDs). GPT is the choice of using a high-capacity disk in Windows.

The following table is the Windows operating system information that is appropriate for MBR and GPT:

	Mbr	Gpt
Windows operating system version	MS-DOS and all Windows editions	Windows 2003 or later
Hardware support	32-bit CPU	64-bit CPU
Maximum support for a single logical volume	2TB	256TB
Partition Table Copy number	A copy	Primary and backup two partition table, support checksum
Maximum number of supported partitions	4 primary partitions or 3 primary partitions and one extended partition	128 partitions
Data storage location	stored in the partition	stored in partitions, critical platform data is stored in a partition that is hidden from the user

The following table is the volume type supported by basic and dynamic disk (MBR disk type):

Basic	Dynamic	Volume type
Support	Support	Simple Volume
Support	Support	Spanned Volume
Support	Support	Striped Volume (Raid-0)
Support	Support	RAID-5 Volume
Support	Support	Mirrored Volume (Raid-1)

The following table is the volume type (GPT disk type) supported by basic and dynamic disk, and you can see that you need to implement software RAID in Windows and you need to convert the disk type to dynamic.

Basic	Dynamic	Volume type
Support	Support	Simple Volume
	Support	Spanned Volume
	Support	Striped Volume (Raid-0)
	Support	RAID-5 Volume
	Support	Mirrored Volume (Raid-1)

Summarize:

After Windows connects to storage, choose to select the GPT partition type with dynamic disk to try all the improvements in Windows Storage management flexibility, GPT partition format aside the MBR maximum 2TB capacity limit, support online expansion, various advantages. Dynamic disks are not limited by the number of partitions. The way to enable GPT and dynamic disk is simple.

In Windows Server 2008/2008R2, the Server manager–storage–disk management– right-click the disk you want to convert;

In Windows Server 2003/2003 R2, computer management–disk management– Right-click the disk that you want to convert.

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Introduction to the disk types for Windows Storage Management