Question

You've been tasked by your supervisor to teach basic hard drive partitioning to a couple of new hires. Write a short essay describing the difference between simple volumes, spanned volumes, and striped volumes. What's better? When would you use one and not the others?

Answer 1

First understand what is volume so it is a storage unit created from free space in computer disks.When volumes are distributed on dynamic disks it can have any of the following layouts :

Simple , Spanned or Striped

Now lets understand these three in detail below :

1. Simple : A simple volume uses free space from a single disk only. However it can be single region or multiple regions on a disk. It can be extended within the same disk .

2 . Spanned : A spanned volume uses free space from multiple disks linked together .It has a limit of 32 disks for expansion.However it is not a fault tolerant.

3. Striped : A striped volume data is interleaved between two or more physical disks and data is allocated alternately and evenly to each of the physical disks . It cant be extended and also not a fault tolerant.

We should use the above layouts as per our requirements .

Like if we require speed then striped is faster than Spanned .However if speed is not required then we should opt for spanned since here data is stored sequentially and it fills up one drive first before switching to the next hence optimizes space as well.

Also important point to note is failure of any drive in striped would lead to total loss of data while we can retrieve some data in case of failure in spanned .However if you have a better backup then anyone can be opted.

So when you have some data not so important like personal data then you can use simple layout. When you have some critical data like official data then opt for spanned layout with backup. When you have huge data and have multiple disks further you want that all disks should be utilized equally without giving load to a single disk then opt for striped layout.

I hope you well understood these layouts in crisp and can have a general idea on the purpose of each layout and utilization of all these when required.