Dell PowerVault 715N (Rackmount NAS Appliance) - Manual (Page 30)

Layout identifies the object, such as Dynamic Mirrored Volume and Dynamic Striped Volume.
Disk Group shows an entry for disks in a basic or dynamic group.
Capacity is the maximum size of the disk.
Free Space is the amount of free hard-drive space still available.
Progress shows the current progress (percentage of completion) for tasks.
File System shows the type of file system.
Graphical Layout is a graphical representation of how much of the disk is being used.
The Events tab displays event log messages associated with storage objects.
The Disk View tab displays a graphical layout of the disks on your system, including CDs or other removable
media.
The DM View tab is grayed-out on the Array Manager console.
Disk Management
This subsection provides conceptual and procedural information about how Array Manager implements basic and dynamic
disks.
The following topics are discussed:
Upgrading a basic disk to a dynamic disk
Reactivating dynamic disks
Merging foreign disks
Upgrading a Basic Disk to a Dynamic Disk
Basic and Dynamic Disks
Disks are any storage unit presented to Windows 2000 as a single contiguous block of storage. When using the Array
Manager, you can use two types of disks—basic or dynamic.
Basic disks employ the traditional disk partitioning used by MS-DOS® and Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, and
Windows NT® 4.0 operating systems. A basic disk can have up to four primary partitions or three primary partitions plus
an extended partition. The extended partition can be subdivided into a number of logical drives.
Dynamic disks contain volume management databases comprising information about all other dynamic disks and volumes
on a system. This information allows dynamic disks to support dynamic volumes, which are defined in the following
subsection. Storage on a dynamic disk is divided into volumes instead of partitions.
Basic and Dynamic Volumes
A volume is made up of portions of one or more physical disks. You can format a volume with a file system and access it
by a drive letter. Like disks, volumes can be basic or dynamic.
Basic volumes refer to volumes created on basic disks. They include primary and extended partitions and logical drives on
extended partitions.
Dynamic volumes are volumes created on dynamic disks. There are five types of dynamic volumes—simple, spanned,
mirrored, striped, and RAID-5. However, you can expand only simple and spanned volumes using Dell OpenManage Array
Manager. These are the only types of volumes that this document addresses. See the Dell OpenManage Array Manager
online help for more information about mirrored, striped, and RAID-5 dynamic volumes.
To upgrade a basic disk to a dynamic disk, perform the following steps:
1. Launch Array Manager.