Acronis Disk Director 11 Advanced Workstation - User Guide - Manual (Page 17)

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Striped volume
A volume that resides on two or more dynamic disks and whose data is evenly distributed across
equally-sized portions of disk space (called stripes) on those disks.
Access to data on striped volumes is usually faster than on other types of dynamic volumes, because
it can be performed simultaneously on multiple hard disks.
Unlike a mirrored volume (p. 89), a striped volume does not contain redundant information, so it is
not fault-tolerant.
A striped volume is also known as a RAID-0 volume.
Mirrored volume
A fault-tolerant volume whose data is duplicated on two physical disks (p. 89).
Each of the two parts of a mirrored volume is called a mirror.
All of the data on one disk is copied to another disk to provide data redundancy. If one of the hard
disks fails, the data can still be accessed from the remaining hard disks.
Volumes that can be mirrored include the system volume (p. 91) and a boot volume (p. 82).
A mirrored volume is sometimes called a RAID-1 volume.
Note: No redundancy provided by the dynamic volumes architecture can replace the proper backup procedure.
If you want to be sure of the safety of your data, the best policy is to combine both precautions.
4.4 Active, system, and boot volumes
Some volumes on the disks of your machine contain information that is necessary for the machine to
start and for a particular operating system to run. Each such volume is called active, system, or boot,
depending on its function.
If only one Windows operating system is installed on your machine, a single volume is often the
active, system, and boot volume at the same time.
Because of their special role, you should use extra caution when performing operations with these
volumes. Some operations with these volumes have limitations as compared to ordinary volumes.
Active volume
This is the volume from which the machine starts after you switch it on.
The active volume usually contains one of the following programs:
 The operating system
 A program that enables you to choose which operating system to run (if more than one is
installed), such as GRUB
 A diagnostic or recovery tool that runs before the operating system, such as Acronis Startup
Recovery Manager
In Acronis Disk Director, the active volume is marked with a flag-like icon:
If you choose to run a Windows operating system, the start process continues from the volume
known as the system volume.