Dell PowerVault 715N (Rackmount NAS Appliance) - Manual (Page 23)

Disk Management
This section describes conceptual and procedural information about how Array Manager implements basic and dynamic
disks.
The following topics are discussed:
Upgrading a basic disk to a dynamic disk
Reactivating dynamic disks
Merging foreign disks
Upgrading a Basic Disk to a Dynamic Disk
Basic and Dynamic Disks
Disks are any storage unit presented to Windows 2000 as a single contiguous block of storage. When using the Array
Manager, you can use two types of disks—basic or dynamic.
Basic disks employ the traditional disk partitioning used by MS-DOS® and Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, and
Windows NT® 4.0 operating systems. A basic disk can have up to four primary partitions or three primary partitions plus
an extended partition. The extended partition can be subdivided into a number of logical drives.
Dynamic disks contain volume management databases comprising information about all other dynamic disks and volumes
on a system. This information allows dynamic disks to support dynamic volumes, which are defined in the following
subsection. Storage on a dynamic disk is divided into volumes instead of partitions.
Basic and Dynamic Volumes
A volume is made up of portions of one or more physical disks. You can format a volume with a file system and access it
by a drive letter. Like disks, volumes can be basic or dynamic.
Basic volumes refer to volumes created on basic disks. They include primary and extended partitions and logical drives on
extended partitions.
Dynamic volumes are volumes created on dynamic disks. There are five types of dynamic volumes—simple, spanned,
mirrored, striped, and RAID-5. However, you can expand only simple and spanned volumes using Dell OpenManage Array
Manager. These are the only types of volumes that this document addresses. See the Dell OpenManage Array Manager
online help for more information about mirrored, striped, and RAID-5 dynamic volumes.
Simple and Spanned Dynamic Volumes
Simple dynamic volumes are dynamic volumes that contain disk space from only one dynamic disk. You can expand them
to contain more space on the same disk or to include disk space from additional dynamic disks. If a simple volume is
expanded to include multiple disks, it becomes a spanned volume. You can then expand the volume to include more
disks, if necessary.
Because only dynamic disks can be used for online volume extension, Dell recommends that you use Array Manager to
upgrade all data disks on your system to dynamic. The upgrade includes new disks, which are added to the system as
basic disks.
To upgrade a basic disk to a dynamic disk, perform the following steps:
1. Right-click the disk you want to upgrade and click Upgrade Dynamic Disk.
The Upgrade Disk Wizard provides information about upgrading.
2. Click Next to continue.
The system asks you to select the disks to upgrade.
3. Add the basic disks you want to upgrade to the list of dynamic disks and click Next.
4. Click Finish.