Extend Mirrored Dynamic Disk on Windows Server Safely and Indirectly

Before Windows Vista, 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. A dynamic disk is a physical disk that provides features that basic disks do not have, such as support for volumes spanning multiple disks, extend dynamic volume, redundant array of independent disk, etc.

What is dynamic mirrored Volume?

Disk mirroring. Optimized for Redundancy

Mirrored Volume uses mirroring to write data to multiple drives. This means that when you write a file, the file is actually written to two disks. The tradeoff with Mirrored Volume is cost. With Mirrored Volume, you must purchase double the amount of storage space that your data requires.

Minimum number of drives: 2

Strengths: Very high performance; Very high data protection; Very minimal penalty on write performance.

Weaknesses: High redundancy cost overhead; Because all data is duplicated, twice the storage capacity is required.

What is the shortage of dynamic disk and Mirrored Volume?

Though compare to basic disk, dynamic disk has many advantages, it has two typical disadvantages. One is that if you convert a basic disk to dynamic, you cannot convert dynamic disk back to basic without data loss by Windows built-in disk management, as you need to delete all dynamic volume firstly before converting. The other is that in most conditions the dynamic volume still cannot be extended, especially for System volume, Boot volume, Mirrored Volume, so many people would encounter this problem if they need to extend mirrored dynamic disk. More seriously, there is no third-party product can extend mirrored dynamic disk directly. So the best way out is to convert mirrored volume to basic disk first, then extend the basic disk and convert it back to mirrored disk.

How to convert dynamic disk with mirrored volumes?

1. Right click "My Computer" and choose "Manage" -> "Storage" -> "Disk Management", right click the mirrored volumes and choose "Break Mirrored Volume" to break mirrored volumes or choose "Remove Mirror" to remove mirror. If the boot/system partition is on the mirrored volumes, you can only choose "Remove Mirror" to remove mirror. Please backup your important data before this operation.

2. After choosing "Break Mirrored Volume" or "Remove Mirror", the mirrored volumes will become simple volumes. Select dynamic disk which you want to convert to basic disk on the disk map, click "Disk" on main menu and choose "Convert to Basic Disk" or right click the dynamic disk and choose "Convert to Basic Disk".

3. After you choose "Convert to Basic Disk", you will see the dynamic disk has become basic disk on the disk map.

4. Click "Apply" to convert dynamic disk to basic disk. After EASEUS Partition Master applies these changes, you will see the dynamic disk has been become basic disk in Windows Disk Management. And then you can use "Resize/Move" feature of EASEUS Partition Master to resize partitions on the basic disk.

How to convert it back to mirrored volume.

After the dynamic disk with mirrored volume converted to basic and the volumes are resized, you can convert it back to dynamic.

Add a new mirrored volume to the resized new dynamic volume.

Tips:

1. This Convert to Basic Disk feature is unavailable in Linux bootable disk.

2. This Convert to Basic Disk feature can only process dynamic disk with simple and mirrored volumes. The other types of dynamic volume like spanned volume, striped volume are not supported. How to change dynamic disk to basic disk safely and easily without losing data?

3. This Convert to Basic Disk feature can only support converting up to 4 simple volumes on dynamic disk. Because the basic disk based on MBR can only create up to 4 primary partitions.

4. All other operations are not available before "Convert to Basic Disk" is applied.

5. After converting, all volumes will be primary partitions.

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