Can you span a basic disk

Unlike mirrors, striped, and RAID-5 volumes, which cannot be extended after they are created, both simple and spanned volumes can be extended. When you extend a simple or spanned volume, you add areas of free space either from the current disk or disks being used o or from other disks to create a single volume.

The volume also cannot be a boot or system volume, and there's a limitation of 32 disks for expansion, meaning a volume can span up to 32 disks, but no more. Additionally, you can't extend simple or spanned volumes that were upgraded from basic disks, either.

This starts the Extend Volume Wizard, as shown in Figure Click Next. This wizard helps you increase the size of simple and spanned volumes on dynamic disks. Disk 0 is the system drive containing the Windows Server operating system.

Disks 1 and 2 are both initialized using the MBR partition style and have been converted to dynamic disks but have yet to have any volumes created on them. The objective of this tutorial is to create a spanned volume which uses the entire capacity of disks 1 and 2. Assuming that the Disk Management snap-in is currently running, right click on the first disk drive and select New Spanned Volume This will invoke the New Spanned Volume Wizard.

This screen provides the option to select disk drives from which the spanned volume is to be constructed.

By default, only the drive on which the new volume is being created is listed. Consequently, the Maximum available space value reflects only the space available on the current disk.

In this example, however, the volume is going to span both disks 1 and 2. Having done so the amount of space from each drive may be selected up to the maximum combined space from both disks:.

With the desired total volume size configured by selecting each drive and selecting the amount of space to be allocated the Next button may be pressed to move the drive letter or mount point allocation screen. Select either a suitable drive letter or mount point and click on Next to proceed. Finally, select the file system format and disk compression options and once again click Next to proceed to the summary screen.

To initiate the creation of the volume, click on Finish. After a short delay the Disk Management graphical view will show the volume being formatted on both drives. When completed the spanned volume is ready for use. In addition to using the Disk Management interface, Windows Server allows spanned volumes to be created from the command prompt using the diskpart tool. Invoke this tool by typing diskpart at a command prompt or in a Run dialog box.

For the purposes of this tutorial we will be creating a volume on disk 1 and then extending it such that it spans both disk 1 and disk 2. With disk 1 selected the next step is to create a volume on the disk. This is achieved using the create volume command. Initially the volume is going to be a simple volume. We will later extend the volume onto disk 2 thereby creating a spanned volume:.

By not including a size the command will default to using all available space on the disk. Having created the volume on the first disk, the next step is to select the volume and extend it onto disk 2. A spanned volume provides no additional speed benefits and increases the risk of catastrophic failure leading to data loss. The failure of any disk involved in the spanned volume will make the entire volume unavailable.

With striping, every file on a volume is evenly distributed between multiple physical disks. With striping, files can be read from or written to multiple disks simultaneously, increasing throughput.

Spanning simply appends one disk to the next, so any given file is probably stored only on a single disk. The best way to add striping is to use a computer or add-on card that supports hardware RAID.

Creating a spanned volume using DiskPart is a somewhat more complicated process than creating a simple volume.