difference between basic and dynamic disks

can anyone tell me why or what the difference is between basic and dynamic disks in xp?? I've got 4 physical harddrives, 2 have already taken the primary and secondary IDE ports on my motherboard. The other 2 are located on a ATA133 controller card which has them shown up as dynamic.

I noticed that I can do a quick format on the 2 harddrives connected to my controller card in Administrative Tools. I thought I was having problems when it took about 5 hours to format a 120gb harddrive partitioned into 2 partitions of 60gb each. I just happened to try a quick format, reinitialize and then noticed it was a healthy partition.

Windows XP Professional supports two types of disk storage: basic and dynamic.

Basic disk storage uses normal partition-oriented disks. A basic disk contains basic volumes (primary partitions, extended partitions, and logical drives).

Dynamic disk storage uses volume-oriented disks, and includes features that basic disks do not, such as the ability to create volumes that span multiple disks (spanned and striped volumes).

A disk initialized for dynamic storage is called a dynamic disk. It can hold simple volumes, spanned volumes, mirrored volumes, striped volumes, and RAID-5 volumes. With dynamic storage, you can perform disk and volume management without having to restart the operating system.

Here's a good article:

http://www.petri.co.il/difference_be..._2000_2003.htm


And there is plenty of good info in the online Resorce Kit documentation here (look in Part II, Chapter 12):

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d...k_overview.asp

thanx guys. I was just wondering because I found it odd that formatting a drive under the controller card took longer in the beginning stages of formatting. It was only when I decided to experiment and see if the quick format worked and apparently it did!