In Microsoft Windows, a new kind of disk management technology for hard disks. Dynamic disks are different from basic disks, which are disk systems that function similarly to earlier versions of Windows and are also supported by Windows 2000. You create and manage dynamic disks using the Disk Management portion of the Computer Management administrative tool.
Dynamic disks use a Windows 2000–based disk management technology called dynamic storage, which creates a single partition for the entire physical disk. This dynamic disk can then be divided into a number of dynamic volumes, each consisting of one dynamic disk or portions of one or more dynamic disks.
In other words, dynamic volumes can span several dynamic disks or several portions of a single dynamic disk. Dynamic disks cannot contain the partitions and logical drives that can be created on basic disks. You can create dynamic disks only on Windows 2000 machines; they cannot be accessed locally by MS-DOS and legacy Windows operating systems in a dual-boot configuration.
The main advantage of using dynamic disks is that you can resize and reconfigure them without rebooting the system. You can thus create and delete simple volumes, spanned volumes, striped volumes, mirrored volumes, and RAID-5 volumes on machines running Windows 2000 without needing to reboot the machine.
You can use Disk Management to revert a dynamic disk to a basic disk, but you must first remove all volumes from the dynamic disk. Once the disk is reverted, you can create only partitions and logical drives on it.