Note: you can’t use a Dynamic Disk for a removable / portable drive.

RAID5 Volume – only works on server editions, but it can stripe across 3 or more hard drives and include a parity stripe to prevent data loss if a drive was to fail.

Read performance should be faster, but write performance will possibly be slightly slower, since Windows has to write to both drives for everything.

Mirrored Volume – for home users, this is the only form of redundancy that you will get with software options.

Two or more drives are basically taped together to make a bigger disk.

Spanned Volume – data fills up on one drive and then fills up the next drive as it gets more full.

Striped Volume – data is striped across multiple hard drives so that every other segment of data is staggered between the drives for maximum performance.

If the disk type is “Basic”, this creates an actual partition.

Simple Volume – this is a regular “partition”.

If you dig a little deeper, you will find that you can switch your hard drives between MBR (Master Boot Record) and GPT (Guid Partition Table) as the partition scheme, and then you can specify whether to use Basic (the default) partitions, or to use “Dynamic”, which is a special method to allow Windows to handle the partitioning.

You can create Spanned, Striped, or Mirrored volumes across multiple disks, or you can create and attach virtual hard drives. You can create and edit partitions… but there is a lot more to do. There’s a list of your hard drives combined with a graphical representation of the partitions on each one. The Disk Management utility seems fairly simple at first glance. Understanding Windows Administration Tools.Using Group Policy Editor to Tweak Your PC.

Understanding and Managing Windows Services.Understanding the Advanced System Properties Panel.Monitoring Your PC with Resource Monitor and Task Manager.Learning to Use the Registry Editor Like a Pro.Understanding Hard Drive Partitioning with Disk Management.Using Event Viewer to Troubleshoot Problems.Using Task Scheduler to Run Processes Later.

Hard drive manager