WARNING: Before Attempting any of the procedures or tips presented in this article backup your system and data to an external source in case you make a mistake or something fails.

Our focus scenario throughout this four part series is going to be adding a second internal Magnetic Disk, however the series also covers information concerning the benefits of SSD and issues related to other drives.

This first segment is not so much about how to install a hard drive, that is covered in Part III, but rather about the basics of understanding the confusing array of drive formats, disk file systems and many of the terms that are used.  This information is extremely helpful if you have not made up your mind as to what you should do once your second drive is physically installed.  Windows XP based systems give you many options for using a hard drive and how the data is stored on them.  The focus of this article is which of those options to choose.

This of course is a guess, but about 90 percent of the articles and videos “out there” do not even mention the possibility of doing anything with your drive once it is installed.  Part of the reason is that even many trained repair professionals, when pressured, will admit that they don’t understand all terminology and the options.  Let’s take some time now and discuss this subject before adding that drive to your computer.

FAT32 versus NTFS file systems.

When deciding to format a drive it is important to know whether or not you want the drive to function as a FAT32 file system or an NTFS file system drive.  In the next section there is a discussion  about SDD flash drives and thumbdrives?  Most of those are formatted for FAT32.  The reason is that many.  Some  “quick removal” functions used for USB based flash drives require FAT32.  (Note: If you do a search on “quick removal” or “quick release” and USB or Flash you will get about 200,000 returns about USB thumb drives with quick removal mechanisms for disconnecting it from the neck strap or lanyard it is attached to.  The quick removal I am speaking of is software that allows you to remove the drive from the machine without having to use the task bar function “Safely remove hardware” to make sure there are no open files etc.) You don’t have to use the quick removal, so that means that thumb drive or SDD drive could be formatted as NTFS.  As a matter of fact “optimizing” for quick removal actually slows down disk access to your USB based flash drive.  Optimizing for Performance is the better choice.  Not all drives have these features.

 WARNING: If you chose to do so you must remember not to remove the drive without closing all the files and using the taskbar option  “Safely remove hardware” for releasing the drive before removing it from the computer.  If you fail to do so data and or file damage could occur.  Also, keep in mind that the drive may not work properly on other computers using a different Operating System.

Lets look at some of the pros and cons for Flash based drives: 

In the case of flash technology you should keep in mind that there are programs that will not work with FAT32 and programs that will not work unless you are using FAT32.  You also should know that NTFS has a higher initial overhead.  On the other hand FAT32 does not offer NTFS rights and other security features.  Another issue to consider is whether or not you plan to use your flash drive on a computer running another operating system.  Fat32  can be used on current and older windows machines as well as on Macintosh computers.

In the case of magnetic Hard Drives the reliability, security and speed factors all favor the NTFS format, so the choice here should be clear.

If your older magnetic drive is FAT32 you should probably consider re-formatting it to the NTFS format.  Note:  Formatting a drive removes all of the data on the drive.  If you have files you want to keep you should make copies to another drive before formatting.

Our example magnetic drive is an older drive with data on it and it is FAT32.  In addition it has an old copy of Windows installed and it is a boot disk. In order to format it I will need to “unmount” the partition.

Now there are a couple of things that we should discuss at this point.  Basic drives versus Dynamic drives and partitions versus volumes.

Basic -  (sometimes referred to as simple ) It can be either FAT32 or NTFS.  It uses partitions (also known as basic volumes ) and is limited to 4. A partition can be extended to another drive, but there is no “native” way to do this without losing data.  Basic Drives are not Fault Tolerant.

Basic Drive and Partitions: A basic drive is exactly like it sounds.  It is a drive with nothing special about it.  It can be either NTFS or FAT32.  Basic drives use partitions  If you want the drive to have a single partition then all of the disk space on the drive will be assigned to whatever drive letter you designate for it.  You can have multiple partitions and assign drive letters to each partition.  Partitions however have drawbacks.  For example, once you set the partition sizes you are pretty much stuck with them.  There is no “native” way to change the size of a partition unless you want to remove the data that is already on it.  There are third party utilities that will do this for you, but there is no guarantee that your data will be safe after changes.  So if you take a 100GIG physical hard drive and make 30 GIG your C: drive and 70 GIG your E: drive there is no way to go back and change it to 40 GIG and 60 GIG without reformatting.  (These partitions are sometimes referred to as “logical” drives to differentiate them from physical drives.  Space that is assigned to a partition is referred to as “allocated.”)  Another problem with partitions is that they cannot expand beyond the bonds of a physical drive.  If you added a third drive to give your computer more space you cannot add the extra space to the C: partition. (There is one trick for getting around this limitation and I will show it later in Part IV.)

All about Dynamic Disk:

Dynamic Drive and Volumes:  Unlike a basic drive, a Dynamic drive uses Dynamic Volumes in place of Basic partitions.  (Note: Unfortunately Microsoft mixes the terminology a little and partitions are also referred to as basic volumes.) Unlike partitions, Dynamic volumes can be changed to include additional free “unallocated” space and they can expand to a second or across multiple drives.

Warning:  Dynamic drives cannot easily be changed back to BASIC drives.

Another way to do this is to change both drives to Dynamic disk.  This will change the partitions to volumes and open up several options for how the drives are used and how data is stored.  The problem is that there are serious drawbacks to nearly all of the Dynamic disk setups except for Raid 5 and unfortunately  you can’t use it on a Windows XP machine.

Storage system options with Dynamic disk and volumes.

Dynamic Simple Volume - This is a single drive that is using the NTFS file system and Dynamic Volumes instead of partitions or basic volumes.  Dynamic Drives can have multiple volumes and the volumes can expand beyond the bounds of a single physical drive. Not a Fault Tolerant volume.

Spanned  (sometimes referred to as Concatenated ) – These are usually multiple Dynamic drives that data is written to sequentially.  Generally they are Dynamic drives that have a volume setup or extended to each of them.  When space runs out on the first drive data is written to the second etc. Not a Fault Tolerant volume set.

Stripped -  These are just liked Spanned volumes but data is written in equal sized stripes across all the disk in the set.  Each Disk in the set must be the same size.   There is a speed advantage especially if the drives are connected to separate controllers. The disadvantage here is that data can be lost or become corrupt on a single stripe or disk and the data cannot easily be recovered. A stripped drive set is also known as Raid 0. Not a Fault Tolerant volume set.

Mirrored – (not available in Windows XP, but commonly used on Windows 2003 servers. This feature supposedly exist in Windows XP SP3, but requires a “hack” and we have not investigated this.)  A set of mirrored drives consist of an equal number of duplicate drives.  The drives must be the same size.  For example if you set up a mirrored set of two stripped or spanned drives you would need four drives total. This type of volume is Fault Tolerant. If data on one drive becomes corrupt it can be read from the other.

Raid 5  (not available in Windows XP, but commonly used on Windows 2003 servers.  This feature supposedly exist in Windows XP SP3, but requires a “hack” and we have not investigated this.)  Just like Stripped volumes data is written in stripes across the drives in the set, but an extra drive is used to record parity information for each stripe written.  All of the drives must be the same size. If one drive or stripe fails the parity information can be used to replace the lost data.  It gives you the advantage of both stripped and mirrored drives but only needs one “extra” drive to do it. This type of volume is Fault Tolerant. If data on one drive becomes corrupt it can be read/reconstructed from the parity information on the extra drive.

There are others such as Layered, but these are the main types.

Additional Terms:

Fault Tolerance or Fault tolerant drives:  A drive that can recover gracefully from a software or hardware failure.

Redundancy:  Drives that are Mirrored drives and Raid 5 (striped with parity) all offer redundancy of your data should a drive become damaged, corrupt or fail. This redundancy is in the form of a duplicate drive or duplicate data in the form of parity information.

A Note about some old terminology:  If you do further research on this subject you will no doubt come across the terms “System Volume” and “Boot Volume” or “System partition” and “Boot Partition”.  Basically the “System partition” was usually a small partition that was created for booting the system with DOS in case Windows failed to load from an NTFS partition.  The partition that contained Windows was referred to as the “Boot partition”.  This is no longer common practice.

There are two different types of volumes that you may also see references to.  The MBR partition/volume and a Data partition/Volume.  The difference here is that the MBR partition/volume is the one that contains your Master Boot Record for booting the system.  Typically this will be the C:drive.  All other partitions and volumes, unless the system is setup for dual boot,  are data volumes.  Data volumes are pretty much everything else.

Important Notes: 

Converting a Disk to Dynamic will prevent the disk from being used for starting other operating systems or for dual boot purposes.

Once a drive is converted to Dynamic it cannot easily be changed back to Basic.  Generally your drive would need to be backed up to another drive or device and the drive volumes would have to be removed. After that the drive can be re-formatted. This can be further complicated if the volume expands to another disk or multiple disk.

Basic disk converted to Dynamic Disk will have volumes created that match any of the partitions already on the drive.

Dynamic disk cannot be accessed by older versions of Windows. Once you convert a disk to Dynamic access to the disk is limited to Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Dynamic disk are not supported on portable computers or Windows XP home Edition.

Basic drives can be converted to Dynamic drives, but they must be in NTFS format.

Technically Basic disk can have multidisk volume sets just like Dynamic disk, but Windows XP does not support them.

In summary.

Advantages of FAT32 file format :  Needed for Dual Boot systems where you want to have the option of booting from more than one operating system. Used by most flash drives mainly for the purpose of a quick removal function and for compatibility across different computer platforms.

Advantages of NTFS file format: Better security and reliability features.  Required for Dynamic disk and many of the Volume multi-disk options..

Advantages of BASIC Disk :  Each drive is independent of one another (under Windows XP ).  If the drives are connected to separate controllers there can be speed increases when data on one drive and data on another are accessed at the same time.

Advantages of Dynamic Disk: In the case of multiple disk, using a Basic Disk limits you to using partitions. There is no “native” way to change the size of a partition once it is in place. Dynamic disk volumes can be resized to add additional available space to the volume.  Dynamic Disk also offer many more volume options such as Spanned and Striped.