Okay, I am working totally from memory here....
Basic Versus Dynamic.
The first, and possibly the greatest, beneift I have found adding to an alreadyc reated partition. With dynmaic disks, if your partition becomes full (in other words, your dive is full), you can "add" another partition to the end, thereby increasing the overall size of the partition. This can be done from any disk on your system....One note: you cannot increase/attach to the C (read as system) Drive.
For example...if you set up your D Drive to 4G and it is near full, on a basic disk, you must create an E Drive and start putting new data there. On a dynamic disk, you can simply put the new disk space "into" the existing D Drive partition, thereby making it larger and no longer near full.
The other major benifit I have encounter is access time. When I upgraded from basic to dynamic (which is the very first thing I do after installing windows), hard drive access time was cut down, by as much as 50%. I could actually see the access times drop....
I would suggest to anyone to check out the help files in windows 2000 about basic and dynamic disks, and look for other resources. I am currenly enrolled in a windows 2000 network adminstration class and we spent approx two weeks talking about this subject. There are some good resources out there. (I don't remember any off the top of my head though...sorry!) Check microsoft's web site, I beleive there is some explainations there.
Of course, my last comment will be the dreaded warning.....If you are considering moving from basic to dynamic disks,
BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! first. That way, if you decide dynamic disks is not for you, you have not lost all your data. If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? - Albert Einstein
Robert L. Johnson III, A+, Network+, MCP
Access Developer/Programmer
robert.l.johnson.iii@citigroup.com