Basic Disks
Basic disks store their configuration information in the master boot record (MBR), which is stored on the first sector of the disk. The configuration of a Basic disk consists of the partition information on the disk. Basic Fault Tolerant sets inherited from Windows NT 4.0 are based on these simple partitions, but they extend the configuration with some simple partition relationship information, which is stored on the first track of the disk.
Dynamic Disks
Dynamic disks are associated with Disk Groups. A Disk Group is a collection of disks managed as a collection. Each disk in a Disk Group stores replicas of the same configuration data. This configuration data is stored in a 1 megabyte (MB) region at the end of each Dynamic disk.
The information for Simple, Mirrored, RAID-5, Striped, or Spanned volumes is contained in a private database that is stored at the end of each Dynamic Disk. Each private database replicates across all Dynamic Disks for fault tolerance. Since the information about the disks is contained on the disks, you can move the disk to another computer or install another disk without losing this information. All Dynamic Disks in a computer are members of the same Disk Group.
