Table 1: Dynamic Disk Volume Types
Volume Layout Type Simple volume	Characteristics and Features Consists of free space from one disk. The free space can come from one or multiple regions of the disk. You can extend a simple volume across multiple disks, but it then becomes a spanned volume.
Spanned volume	Created from free disk space linked from multiple (as many as 32) physical disks. You can extend a spanned volume onto additional disks, but you can't mirror it.
Mirrored volume	A fault-tolerant volume created by duplicating data between two physical disks (also known as software mirroring or RAID 1).
Striped volume	A volume with data interleaved across two or more physical disks. The data is allocated in even "chunks" (also called stripes) across each disk. In Windows, you can't combine a striped volume with a mirrored volume to create a striped mirror set (RAID 0+1).
RAID 5 volume	A fault-tolerant volume with data interleaved or striped across three or more physical disks in conjunction with striped parity information. You can use the striped parity information and the striped data contained on the volume to provide data protection if one of the physical disks fails. You can't mirror or extend a RAID 5 volume.
System volume	The volume (often the same as the boot volume) that contains machine-specific boot files (e.g., boot.ini, ntdetect.com, NT Loader) that you need to load the OS.
Boot volume	Contains the OS files and holds the \%systemroot% and \%systemroot%\system32 directories. It's often combined with the System volume.