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To create a striped volume, right-click unused space on a drive and choose New Volume and then 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 (Figure 12-57). The two stripes in Figure 12-57 appear to have different sizes, but if you look closely you’ll see they are both 4 GB. All stripes must be the same size on each drive.

Figure 12-55 The Extend Volume Wizard

Figure 12-56 Extended volume

Figure 12-57 Two striped drives

Mount Points

The one drive that can’t take full advantage of being dynamic is the drive containing the operating system, your primary master C: drive. You can make it dynamic, but you still can’t do all of the cool dynamic things such as extending and spanning. So what good is being able to allocate more space to a volume if you can’t use it when you start to fill up your C: drive? If you can’t add to that drive, your only option is to replace it with a new, bigger drive, right?

Not at all! Earlier we discussed the idea of mounting a drive as a folder instead of a drive letter, and here’s where you get to do it. A volume mount point (or simply mount point) is a place in the directory structure of an existing volume that you can point to a volume or partition. The mounted volume then functions just like a folder, but all files stored in that segment of the directory structure will go to the mounted volume. After partitioning and formatting the drive, you don’t give it a drive letter; instead, you mount the volume to a folder on the C: drive and make it nothing more than just another folder (Figure 12-58). You can load programs to that folder, just as you would to your Program Files folder. You can use it to store data files or backed-up system files. In function, therefore, the new hard drive simply extends the capacity of the C: drive, so neither you nor your client need ever trouble yourselves with dealing with multiple drive letters.

To create a mount point, right-click an unallocated section of a dynamic disk and choose New Volume. This opens the New Volume Wizard. In the second screen, you can select a mount point rather than a drive letter (Figure 12-59). Browse to a blank folder on an NTFS-formatted drive or create a new folder and you’re in business.

Figure 12-58 A drive volume mounted as a folder of drive C:

With mount points, Microsoft dramatically changed the way you can work with hard drives. You’re no longer stuck in the rut of adding drive letters that mess up Windows’ mapping of the optical drive. You don’t have to confuse clients with multiple drive letters when they just want a little more space. You can resurrect smaller hard drives, making them a functional part of today’s computer. With the Disk Management console in Windows 2000/XP and Windows Vista/7, Microsoft got it right.

Formatting a Partition

You can format any Windows partition/volume in My Computer/Computer. Just right-click the drive name and choose Format (Figure 12-60). You’ll see a dialog box that asks for the type of file system you want to use, the cluster size, a place to put a volume label, and two other options. The Quick Format option tells Windows not to test the clusters and is a handy option when you’re in a hurry—and feeling lucky. The Enable Compression option tells Windows to give users the capability to compress folders or files. It works well but slows down your hard drive.

Figure 12-59 Choosing to create a mounted volume

Figure 12-60 Choosing Format in My Computer

Disk Management is today’s preferred formatting tool for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. When you create a new volume on a dynamic disk or a new partition on a basic disk, the New Volume Wizard also asks you what type of format you want to use. Always use NTFS unless you’re that rare and strange person who wants to dual-boot Windows XP or Windows