Basic disks, dynamic disks, GPT disks, and MBR disks in windows

 

In Windows Disk Manager, right-click the disk tag and "convert to Dynamic Disk", "convert to basic disk", and "convert to GPT disk" appear as disk properties vary ", "convert to MBR disk" and other options. This article provides a brief introduction.

Basic and dynamic Disks

Disk usage can be divided into two categories: one is "Basic disk ". Basic disks are very common. We usually use basic disks ". The "Basic disk" is limited by 26 English letters. That is to say, the disk drive letter can only be one of 26 English letters. Because drive A and drive B are already occupied by the drive, only drive letters C ~ are available on the disk ~ Z 24. In addition, only four primary partitions can be created on the "Basic disk" (primary partition rather than extended partition), and the other disk type is "Dynamic Disk ". "Dynamic Disk" is not limited by 26 English letters. It is named by "volume. The biggest advantage of "Dynamic Disk" is that it can expand the disk capacity to a non-adjacent disk space.

Dynamic hard disk is obtained by upgrading the local hard disk in the disk manager. The biggest difference between a dynamic disk and a basic disk is that it no longer uses the previous partitioning method, but is called a Volume set (Volume ), the volume set includes simple volume, cross-zone volume, with-zone volume, mirror volume, and RAID-5 volume. Compared with dynamic disks, basic disks have the following differences:

1. Quantity of volumes or partitions. There is no limit on the number of volumes that a dynamic disk can create on a hard disk. A basic disk can only be divided into four primary partitions.

2. disk space management. Dynamic disks can create partitions of different disks into a volume set, and these partitions can be non-adjacent. Such a size is the total size of several disk partitions. Basic disks cannot be partitioned across hard disks and must be contiguous. The maximum capacity of each partition can only be the maximum capacity of a single hard disk, and the access speed is not improved compared with that of a single hard disk.

3. Manage disk capacity and size. Dynamic disks allow us to adjust the size of dynamic Disks without restarting the machine, and do not lose or damage existing data. Once a partition of a basic disk is created, the capacity cannot be changed unless you use a third-party disk tool, such as PQ Magic.

4. disk configuration information management and fault tolerance. The Dynamic Disk stores the disk configuration information in the disk. If the RAID fault-tolerant system is copied to another dynamic disk, the fault-tolerant feature of RAID-1 can be used. If a hard disk is damaged, the system will automatically call data from another hard disk to maintain data integrity. The basic disk stores the configuration information in the boot area without fault tolerance.

You can directly convert a basic disk to a dynamic disk, but this process is irreversible. To switch back to a basic disk, you can only copy all the data and then delete all the partitions of the hard disk.

GPT disk and MBR Disk

GPT (Globally Unique Identifier Partition Table Format) is a disk Partition architecture used by the extended firmware interface (EFI) on an Itanium-based computer. Compared with the primary startup record (MBR) Partitioning Method, GPT has more advantages because it allows each disk to have up to 128 partitions and supports a volume size of up to 18 Gigabit bytes, the partition table of the primary disk and the partition table of the backup disk can be used for redundancy. The unique disk and partition ID (GUID) are also supported ).

The maximum supported volumes are 2 TB (terabytes) and each disk can have up to 4 primary partitions (or 3 primary partitions, 1 extended partition, and unlimited logical drives) the GUID Partition Table (GPT) disk partition style supports a maximum of 18 EB (exabytes) and a maximum of 128 partitions per disk. Unlike an MBR partitioned disk, the crucial platform operation data is located in the partition, not in a non-partition or hidden sector. In addition, GPT partition disks have redundant primary and backup partition tables to improve the integrity of the partition data structure.

On x86 and x64-based Windows Server 2003 running with Service Pack 1 (SP1), the operating system must reside on the MBR disk. Other hard disks can be MBR or GPT.

On an Itanium-based computer, the operating system loader and startup partition must reside on the GPT disk. Other hard disks can be MBR or GPT.

You can have either MBR or GPT disks in a single Dynamic Disk group. The basic GPT and MBR disks are also used, but they are not part of the disk group. You can use both MBR and GPT disks to create mirror volumes, with-zone volumes, cross-zone volumes, and RAID-5 volumes. However, the limitations of MBR cylindrical alignment may make it difficult to create mirror volumes. Generally, you can mirror the MBR disk to the GPT disk to avoid the problem of cylindrical alignment. You can convert an MBR disk to a GPT disk and convert it to an MBR disk only when the disk is empty. Otherwise, data will be lost !!!

You cannot use the GPT partition style on a removable media, or on a cluster disk that is connected to a shared SCSI or fiber Channel bus used by the cluster service.

This article is from the WebOS blog