i need to be able to do some eSATA hotswapping in the next few days (migrating data from old drives to new ones) and it looks like converting them to dynamic disks will allow for this (though i have no experience doing it)

right now, all of the old disks are "basic" 2TB MBR drives and the new ones are "basic" 3TB GPT drives...i had to convert the new ones to GPT to get the full 3TB as a single partition, of course

my question is whether or not i should convert them to "dynamic" disks or just use a utility like HotSwap! (http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm)...or, rather, is there any major advantage to converting my storage (non-boot) drives to dynamic over keeping them basic?

10/8/2011 8:41:06 PM

I'm a tad confused why you would need a dynamic drive for a single drive you're using as storage. Dynamic drives are often used when you have multiple drives that you need to function as one - such as software RAID, JBOD, or any other flavor of spanning.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa363785%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

10/9/2011 2:15:21 AM

^ because it was my understanding that in regards to sata/esata, a disk has to be dynamic in order for them to be hotswappable...is this wrong? i know my southbridge supports hotswapping esata, but i don't have any empty drives to test it on right now and i know that once i convert them to dynamic, i can't go back to basic...hence this thread

10/9/2011 8:42:40 AM

you do not, EVER, want to use dynamic disks in windows

10/10/2011 6:26:24 PM

they have caused nothing but pain for me as well.

10/10/2011 9:53:19 PM

I'll third that. I did it once. I didn't do any research. "Dynamic... that sounds better, I think I'd like it if my drives were a bit more dynamic." Fucked.

10/11/2011 11:01:04 AM

advice noted and heeded..."basic" disks they shall remain

10/11/2011 11:20:06 AM

i'm bumping this because now BOTH of my 3TB GPT drives were converted to "raw" randomly and that's extremely frustrating (especially since i can't find a recovery utility that will recover more than a fraction of what was there)

what's going on here? they were in antec MX-1 enclosures, connected via eSATA, windows 7 64-bit...formatted NTFS as basic GPT disk

a quick google search seems to suggest that this isn't an uncommon problem (if not a common one), but i can't figure out a solution...they're basically useless to me if they're going to be randomly wiped

[Edited on November 4, 2011 at 10:04 AM. Reason : this problem: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2161566]

11/4/2011 10:01:05 AM

you guys are NOT helpful

i tried them in a USB enclosure and the same thing happened

i like to blame microsoft...is there any chance this IS a microsoft issue?

[Edited on November 8, 2011 at 11:20 AM. Reason : .]

11/8/2011 11:19:19 AM