Dynamic Disks.. Good or bad?

[gwichman]

I've got some 1U Dell 1550 servers.. 3 SCSI hot swappable drives on them. Due to the smallish size of our drives (18GB each), i've been installing the OS on a 5GB partition on disk 1, then upgrading all three disks to dynamic, and creating a spanned volume across the remaining partitions. Thus i end up with around 48GB of usable space. It's been working well but my inexperience with dynamic disks has me wondering if it's a bad idea to upgrade the disk with the OS on it to dynamic.

Are there implications here that i'm unaware of that could affect me in the future? Appreciate any feedback on concerns i should have.. or shouldnt.

 

[Eagle8648]

Having Dynamic Disk with the Operating system is not a bad idea. ON servers that do not have hotswappable drives (just the standard 2 scsi drives) you have to convert to dynamic before they can be mirrored. The only problem I have found with having dynamic disks is they cannot be seen in a dos environment to reformat. They will have to be converted back to basic. You also cannot use Ghost or PQDI to image the disks to dynamic for back-up. Dynamic is more stable and offer an increased level of security. You can go to the following site for more information on Dynamic and Basic disks.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q175761