on volumes

Volumes and spanning are used to group physical disks in certain configurations. These terms are supported under Windows 2000 and later. There is no such thing as a "static" hard disk.

Some background:

There are two types of disk storage: Basic and dynamic.

Basic disk storage under Windows uses primary and extended partitions to divide one or more hard disks into separate sections. New disks added to Windows are considered basic disks.

The term "Volume" refers to dynamic storage and is only supported under Windows 2000. To support dynamic storage, a single partition is created that includes the entire disk.

Dynamic disks are divided into volumes, which can consist of a portion or portions of one or more physical disks.
A simple volume contains disk space from a single disk. Simple volumes are not fault tolerant.

A spanned volume contains disk space from multiple disks (up to 32) and will be represented as a single logical disk to users. Windows 2000 will writedata to a spanned volume on the first disk, completely filling the space, and continue until all spanned volume disks are filled. This configuration is also not fault tolerant.

Mirrored, striped, and RAID types of dynamic storage are fault tolerant but require multiple disks.

Hope this helps.