What is the difference between a simple volume and a spanned volume?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

A simple volume is a portion of a disk or an entire disk that is set up as a dynamic disk. If you do not allocate all of a disk as a simple volume, you have the option to later take all or a portion of the unallocated space and add it to an existing simple volume, which is called extending the volume. A simple volume can be extended onto multiple sections of the same disk (up to 32 sections). A simple volume does not provide fault tolerance because it cannot be set up for any RAID level. A spanned volume is stored on 2 to 32 dynamic disks that are treated as one volume. For example, you might create a spanned volume if you have four separate small hard disks or if you have several small free portions of disk space scattered throughout the server's disk drives. You might have 600 MB of free space on one drive, 750 MB on another, and 424 MB on a third. All of these free areas can be combined into a single 1774 MB spanned volume with its own drive letter, with the advantage that you reduce the number of drive letters needed to make use of the space. Another difference between spanned volumes and striped volumes is that spanned volumes are filled with data sequentially.