Question: I have bought a removable hard drive enclosure and a 1TB hard drive to fit in it. ?Its pretty cool; it has a little handle at the front of the caddy that allows you to take out the hard drive and stick into another caddy – or swap it for another hard drive, whatever you choose.
The manual talks about converting your dynamic disk to a basic disk if you want the ability to be able to use the “Swap Manager” software (some 3rd party software to allow swapping out of hard drives).
Can anyone explain to what the pros and cons are of having a basic vs dynamic HD?
Answer: Basic is just that – a basic disk, you can remove and add it as will.
Dynamic disk is an enhanced partition table in Windows that enables enhanced features such as software raid. However, In Windows XP it only works in Professional, and I guess it is also locked out of the home editions of Vista/7 (although not tested).
Also, every time you want to use it on a new computer, or even if you just remove and put it in, you will have to manually import the disk.
Personally, unless this is very good software or it has very big benefits, I would leave it is a basic disk – I deal with many removable disks and I use basic on all of them.