Dynamic Disk - Volume Types

1. Spanned Volume

• Free unallocated space from multiple HDDs can be combined together as one volume.
• 2 to 32 hard disks can be combined.
• There is no data security, if any one hard disk fails you will lose the data.
• There is no performance gain, only combined storage.

2. Stripped Volume [ Also called as RAID-0]

• It is also known as RAID-0 (Redundant Array of Independent Disk).
• We can connect from 2 to 32 HDDs in one Striped volume theoretically.
• Used to combine a minimum of 2 to 32 same capacity & type HDDs in one volume.
• Data read and write will be done faster.
• It combines the capacity from multiple disks so storage will be higher.
• If any one HDD fails you will lose the data.

3. RAID-5 Volume [ RAID with Parity - RAID-5]

• Capacity equal to one HDD will be utilized to store parity information.
• Data is written on all the three HDDs with parity information stored on each HDD.
• If any one HDD fails then data can be regenerated from the remaining HDDs in the RAID.
• Capacity equal to one HDD will be used for the parity information.
  For example : 1TB + 1TB + 1TB = 3TB total storage available, but we can use only 2TB for storing data.

4. Mirror Volume

• It is useful for the Server OS for fault tolerance and redundancy of OS and data.
• Mostly it is used for OS fault tolerance.
• It is a must to use same capacity HDDs and the same type like SATA or SSD.
• The same data is written on the first HDD and then on the second HDD.
• If any one HDD fails, your data will be safe on the other HDD. [Fault Tolerance]

In Windows 10 using Disk Management tool you can Extend , Shrink the volumes as per requirement and space available on the hdd.