windows: Is the term "basic disk" the same as "Simple Volume"?

Question

While doing some disk management operations with 4 SSD drives on my windows-10 machine, I read some Microsoft documentation 2022-01-10 that says "dynamic disks" (i.e. Disk Management's "spanned", "striped", "mirror", "raid 5" volumes) "have been deprecated and we don't recommend using them anymore" 2022-01-10 article.

The article talks about converting to "basic disk" but in windows-10 there is no such option in Disk Management GUI (is the term "basic disk" a windows-server only term?).

In Windows-10 Disk Management when you right-click an unallocated harddrive you get the options "Simple Volume", "Spanned Volume", "Striped Volume", "Mirrored Volume", "Raid 5 Volume" (option is gray because apparently the option for "Raid 5 Volume" is only available in windows-server according to what I have).

Is the technical term "basic disk" the same as "simple volume" in windows-10 Disk Management?

Answer 1

"Basic disk" refers to the whole disk – it means the disk uses standard MBR or GPT partitioning (as opposed to Microsoft LDM), and therefore can only contain simple volumes.

The opposite is "Dynamic disk" which uses the LDM partitioning style (Logical Disk Manager; the Windows equivalent of LVM for Linux) and can contain spanned/mirrored/striped volumes in addition to simple volumes.

However, if you only have simple volumes, that doesn't automatically mean they're on a "Basic" MBR/GPT disk – it could still be in "Dynamic" LDM format.

As this is a disk-level property, not a volume-level one, it will be shown in disk information to the left of physical partitions:

Right-clicking that area will offer you an option to convert a Basic MBR disk to Dynamic LDM, or the other way around (as long as it has Simple volumes only).

Answer 2

The two terms are quite different. A basic disk can contain multiple simple volumes.

Basic and Dynamic Disks are the two formats of disks on Windows.

The term basic disk refers to a disk that contains partitions, such as primary partitions and logical drives, which in turn are formatted with a file system to become a volume for file storage. Basic disks provide a simple storage solution.

The other disk format is the Dynamic. Dynamic disks allow more evolved architecture, such as volumes that span multiple disks (spanned and striped volumes) and fault-tolerant volumes (mirrored and RAID-5 volumes). Like basic disks, dynamic disks can use the MBR or GPT partition styles on systems that support both.

A simple volume is a portion of a physical disk that functions as though it were a physically separate unit. A simple volume can consist of a single region on a disk or multiple regions of the same disk that are linked together.

The simple volume can only be created on a dynamic disk, while the primary partition can only be created on a basic MBR or GPT disk.

When extending the simple volume to include unallocated space on the same disk it remains a simple volume.

When extending a simple volume to include unallocated space on other disks on the same computer, this creates a spanned volume.

References:

• Basic and Dynamic Disks
• Volume Object