Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2010 75
Disk Management (Windows XP Professional Resource Kit) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/bb457110.aspx
816307 Best practices for using dynamic disks on Windows Server 2003-based computers
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816307
Dynamic volume
A volume on one or more dynamic disks.
Dynamic volumes provide greater functionality as compared to basic volumes; but older operating
systems, such as Windows 98, might not be able to work with them.
Different types of dynamic volumes suit different purposes. For example, you can:
Increase the volume size beyond the capacity of a single disk, by using a spanned volume
Reduce access time to files, by using a striped volume
Achieve fault tolerance, by using a mirrored volume
For a complete list of volume types, see Volume type (p. 82).
F
Fault tolerance
The ability of a volume to ensure data integrity after a hardware failure.
Fault tolerance is usually achieved by introducing data redundancy, which enables preserving data in
case one of the hard disks containing the volume fails.
Examples of fault-tolerant volumes include mirrored (p. 78) and RAID-5 volumes.
File
A set of data, such as a text document, that is stored under an identifying name—for example:
Document.txt
Files are stored in a file system (p. 75) on a volume. In different file systems, files can be stored in
different ways, with different file name requirements and different ways to write the full path to the
file in the folder (p. 75) tree.
File system
A data structure that is used to store and manage files (p. 75) on a volume.
A file system tracks free and occupied space, supports folders (p. 75) and file names, and stores the
physical positions of files on a disk.
Examples of file systems that are supported in Windows are FAT16 (also known simply as FAT),
FAT32, and NTFS.
Examples of file systems that are supported in Linux are ext2 and ext3.
When formatting (p. 76) a volume, you can choose a file system for it.
