- For Business
- Partition Master ProfessionalBuyTry
- Partition Master ServerBuyTry
- Partition Master UnlimitedBuyTry
Resizing dynamic disk will be helpful to make good use of disk space, especially maximize computer performance. For example, when the system volume is low disk space on dynamic disk, we want to add some free space for system volume to make our computer works well. So we need to resize the bigger dynamic volume to free up some unallocated space and extend system volume.
A dynamic disk is a physical disk that provides features that basic disks do not, such as support for volumes spanning multiple disks. Dynamic disks use a hidden database to track information about dynamic volumes on the disk and other dynamic disks in the computer. A disk managed by a software RAID provider with support for flexible volume reconfiguration. A dynamic disk uses a partition as a container for volumes; there is no guaranteed mapping.
Windows 2000 introduced the Logical Disk Manager and the diskpart command line tool for dynamic storage. All versions of Windows 2000 support three types of dynamic disk volumes: simple volumes, spanned volumes and striped volumes.
Dynamic disk applies to the following Operating Systems.The following table describes the support case for each Windows.
|Operating System||Simple, Spanned and Striped Volume||Mirrored Volume||RAID-5 Volume|
|Windows 2000 Professional||-||-|
|Windows 2000 Server|
|Windows 2000 Advanced Server|
|Windows XP Home||-||-||-|
|Windows XP Professional||-||-|
|Windows Server 2003 Standard|
|Windows Server 2003 Enterprise|
|Windows Vista Home Basic||-||-||-|
|Windows Vista Home Premium||-||-||-|
|Windows Vista Business||-||-|
|Windows Vista Enterprise||-||-|
|Windows Vista Ultimate||-||-|
|Windows Server 2008|
|Windows 7 Starter||-||-||-|
|Windows 7 Home Basic||-||-||-|
|Windows 7 Home Premium||-||-||-|
|Windows 7 Professional||-|
|Windows 7 Enterprise||-|
|Windows 7 Ultimate||-|
Dynamic disk is a good choice for the people who want to maximize the hard drive performance, especially for some small companies or that for particular use. Compared to basic disk, dynamic disk has many advantages. However, it has two huge disadvantages, too. One is that if you convert a basic disk to dynamic, you cannot convert it back to basic without data loss in Disk Management, as you need to delete all dynamic volumes firstly before converting.
The other is that in most conditions the dynamic volume still cannot be extended in disk management, especially for the system volume. Many people would encounter this problem if they need to increase dynamic disk. To offset the limitation of Disk Management and offer better solution for dynamic disk resizing, EaseUS Partition Master offers a powerful function to resize dynamic disk directly with all data protected.
Right click My Computer, select Manage -> Storage -> Disk Management, open Windows built-in Disk Management, you can do following operations on dynamic disk by Disk Management.
Before Windows Vista, Disk Management has the following limitations to resize dynamic volume.
|Features||Windows 2000||Windows Server 2000||Windows XP||Windows Server 2003|
|Extend system volume/boot volume||-||-||-||-|
|Extend/shrink simple volume|
|Extend/shrink spanned volume|
|Extend/shrink mirrored volume||-||-||-||-|
|Extend/shrink striped volume||-||-||-||-|
|Extend/shrink RAID-5 volume||-||-||-||-|
Tips: Extend the simple volume which was converted from the basic disk of Windows XP/2003 that was upgraded from Windows 2000.
In Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows Server 2008, Disk Management has the following limitations to resize dynamic volume.
|Features||Windows Vista||Windows 7||Windows Server 2008|
|Extend/shrink system volume/boot volume|
|Extend/shrink simple volume|
|Extend/shrink spanned volume|
|Extend/shrink mirrored volume||-||-||-|
|Extend/shrink striped volume||-||-||-|
|Extend/shrink RAID-5 volume||-||-||-|
Operations above can not be achieved by Disk Management, but a third-party partition magic software can help you do them to resize dynamic disk.
EaseUS Partition Master can do following dynamic disk management operations :
The following is the comparison of Disk Management and EaseUS Partition Master when resizing dynamic disk.
|Features||Windows 2000/XP/2003 Disk Management||Windows Vista/2008/7 Disk Management||EaseUS Partition Master|
|Extend system volume/boot volume||-|
|Extend simple volume|
|Extend spanned volume|
|Extend mirrored volume||-||-|
|Extend striped volume||-||-|
|Extend RAID-5 volume||-||-|
|Shrink system volume/boot volume||-|
|Shrink simple volume or spanned volume||-|
|Shrink mirrored volume, striped volume or RAID-5 volume||-||-|
Comparing to Disk Management, EaseUS Partition Master provides more convenient and safer way to resize dynamic disk.
Partition manager software - EaseUS Partition Master can help you resize 5 type dynamic volumes: simple volume, mirrored volume, striped volume, spanned volume and RAID-5 volume. Its "Resize dynamic volume" feature can help you:
Note: Our freeware - EaseUS Partition Master Free only supports to covert dynamic disk with simple volumes to basic disk. For resizing dynamic disk or more advanced features, please try our paid version.
Resize dynamic volumes can be easily realized by following steps:
1. Download EaseUS Partition Master and install it on your computer.
2. Launch it and right click the volume that needs to be resized. Then select "Resize volume" to resize dynamic disk;
3. Position the mouse pointer on the right partition handle to extend or shrink the dynamic volume, or you can directly put in a size number.
4. Click OK, and you will see the changed volume in the disk layout. Click Apply to execute the operation.
To resize dynamic disk partition by resizing dynamic volume which can also be realized by converting the dynamic disk directly to basic disk and then resizing the partition in a direct and safe way.
For different dynamic volume, the situations are different when converting basic disk back to dynamic:
Simple Volume: After the Simple Volume being converted and resized on a basic disk, you can convert the basic partition back to Simple Volume in Disk Management without difficulty.
Mirrored Volume: If you want to convert the Mirrored Volume back after being converted to basic disk and resized on basic disk, at first you need to convert it to Simple Volume in Disk Management, then adding mirror with another dynamic disk.
Striped/Spanned/RAID5 Volume: Convert to basic disk feature in EaseUS Partition Master doesn't support Striped Volume, Spanned Volume and RAID 5 Volume. However, if you want to resize them, you can copy striped/spanned/RAID5 volume to basic disk and then resize the basic disk. By the way, these volumes can be converted to Simple Volume or Mirrored Volume only, as these Striped/Spanned/RAID5 dynamic volumes should be re-built in Disk Management. The step by step instructions, please refer to Copy Dynamic Disk.
More advanced features are also provided to manage your hard disk by EaseUS Partition Master.
Besides partition manager features, EaseUS partition manager software also provides some other features like Partition Recovery Wizard to recover deleted or lost partition, Disk & Partition Copy Wizard to upgrade or backup disk.
Dynamic volume basic knowledge:
Simple volume: A volume with disk space from one dynamic disk. The simple volume can be expanded to spanned volume.
Spanned volume: A spanned volume is created from free disk space that is linked together from multiple disks. You can extend a spanned volume onto a maximum of 32 disks. A spanned volume cannot be mirrored and is not fault-tolerant.
Striped volume: A striped volume is also known as RAID-0, store all their data across several disks in stripes. This allows better performance because disk reads and writes are balanced across multiple disks.
Mirrored volume: A mirrored volume is also known as RAID-1, it is the replication of logical disk volumes onto separate physical hard disks in real time to ensure continuous availability. A mirrored volume is a complete logical representation of separate volume copies. When creating a mirrored volume, you must need two dynamic disks at least. If one of the disks fails, the data can still be accessed from the remaining disk.
RAID-5 volume: A RAID-5 volume is a fault-tolerant volume whose data is striped across an array of three or more disks. Parity (a calculated value that can be used to reconstruct data after a failure) is also striped across the disk array. If a physical disk fails, the portion of the RAID-5 volume that was on that failed disk can be re-created from the remaining data and the parity by repairing RAID-5 volume.