CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

without using dynamic disks. You can shrink any volume with available
free space (though you can’t shrink the volume by the whole amount of
free space, based on the location of unmovable sectors such as the MBR),
and you can expand volumes with unallocated space on the drive.
To shrink a volume, right-click on it and select Shrink Volume. Disk
Management will calculate how much you can shrink it, and then you can
choose up to that amount.
Extending volumes is equally straightforward. To extend, right-click
and select Extend Volume.
Note that CompTIA refers to the processes as extending partitions and,
in an odd pairing of grammar, shrink partitions
Striped Volumes If you have two or more dynamic disks in a PC, Disk
Management enables you to combine them into a striped volume. Although
Disk Management doesn’t use the term, you know this as a RAID 0 array. A
striped volume spreads out blocks of each file across multiple disks. Using
two or more drives in a group called a stripe set, striping writes data first to a
certain number of clusters on one drive, then to a certain number of clusters
on the next drive, and so on. It speeds up data throughput because the system
has to wait a much shorter time for a drive to read or write data. The
drawback of striping is that if any single drive in the stripe set fails, all the
data in the stripe set is lost.
To create a striped volume, right-click on any unused space on a drive,
choose New Volume, and then choose Striped. The wizard asks for the other
drives you want to add to the stripe, and you need to select two unallocated
spaces on other dynamic disks. Select the other unallocated spaces and go
through the remaining screens on sizing and formatting until you’ve created a
new striped volume (see Figure 9-44). The two stripes in Figure 9-44 appear
to have different sizes, but if you look closely you’ll see they are both 1000
GB. All stripes must be the same size on each drive.