Quote:
I don't seem to remember it being called "Dynamic Disks" back in the NT4 days


Back then it wasn't. Disk Administrator simply called it fault tolerance.

Dynamic disks in 2000 is actually a technology developed by Veritas. It uses 7 megs of metadata space at the end of the drive, hence the 7 megs usually kept free on a basic disk. Once it is dynamic, it can be made into RAID 0, 1 or 5 with spares, and does support different raid levels on the same drive. I have seen a NAS box use it where the OS was RAID 0+1 across the first two gigs of each drive, then the rest of the drive was RAID 5. So it does tend to match the features of hardware RAID or other software solutions, but it does also lack some key parts.

Dynamic disks is played down a bit in 2003 as MS and Veritas aren't working togther much these days. Initially dynamic disks was the only way to expand a partition (when you asked Microsoft), now they support a tool of theirs to expand basic disks as well.