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Are Windows Dynamic Disks Reliable?

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tinjaw:
I just realized that for years and years I have avoided Windows Dynamic Disks because of bad reports when they first came on the market. I have also never worked for a company or known anybody that uses them.

I was wondering if they have become as reliable as any other software RAID solution. Does anybody have any first or second hand experience with them? Is there any clear-cut reason why I should avoid using Dynamic Disks? I understand their proprietary nature and that it takes a lot of aggravation to fix them if they go bad.

nite_monkey:
The only experience I have had with dynamic disks is with my virtual machine, I have two virtual drives spanned to one drive. But I just did that after reading your post, I wanted to see how dynamic disks worked.

wraith808:
The only experience I had was bad... but that was when it first came on the market.  I lost a *lot* of data because of them, and became scarred against using RAID.  I don't know about currently- I haven't touched them since.

f0dder:
The only experience I had was bad... but that was when it first came on the market.  I lost a *lot* of data because of them, and became scarred against using RAID.  I don't know about currently- I haven't touched them since.-wraith808 (February 24, 2008, 02:36 PM)
--- End quote ---
When was that, Windows 2000 or NT4? And what happened?

wraith808:
Windows 2000.  I'm not sure of the exact details of what happened, but during a routine scandisk, one of the drives had a bad sector, and I tried to mark it as such.  The next few days, my drive was acting wonky, so I got a Jaz drive and started to offload the most critical data.  During the second disk the copy functions started failing, so I tried to back the data up to another drive on my network, but couldn't copy anything.  I rebooted, and windows would recognize the drives, but the partition was gone.  At first I thought the drive had gone bad, but after I did a low level format and ran Norton on the disks, they were fine- In fact, I still use them (just not for critical data).

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