Acronis Disk Director 11 Advanced Server - User Guide - Manual (Page 86)

86 Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2010
group is discontinued, though its name is kept in the above registry key. In case a dynamic disk is
created or connected again, a disk group with an incremental name is created.
When moved to another machine, a disk group is considered as foreign (p. 88) and cannot be used
until imported into the existing disk group. The import updates the configuration data on both the
local and the foreign disks so that they form a single entity. A foreign group is imported as is (will
have the original name) if no disk group exists on the machine.
For more information about disk groups please refer to the following Microsoft knowledge base
article:
222189 Description of Disk Groups in Windows Disk Management
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222189/EN-US/
Disk type
The type of disk, which is determined by the way the disk is organized.
A disk has one of two types: basic disk (p. 83) or dynamic disk (p. 86).
Drive
A physical device for accessing information on a disk (p. 85).
Examples of drives include hard disk drives (p. 89) and floppy disk drives.
Drive letter
See Volume letter (p. 95).
Dynamic disk
A hard disk that is managed by Logical Disk Manager (LDM), which is available in Windows starting
with Windows 2000.
Use of LDM helps to flexibly allocate volumes on a disk for fault tolerance, better performance or
larger volume size.
A dynamic disk can use either the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT)
partitioning scheme (p. 91).
Each dynamic disk has a hidden database where the LDM stores the configuration of all dynamic
volumes existing in the disk group, which makes for better storage reliability. On an MBR disk, this
database occupies the last 1 MB of the disk. On a GPT disk, Windows creates the dedicated LDM
Metadata partition, taking space from the Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR.)
Disk 1
MBR LDM
database
1 MB
Disk 2
Protecti
ve
MBR
GPT
Microsoft
Reserved
Partition (MSR)
LDM
database
GPT