what is a basic disk? The term basic disk refers to a disk that contains partitions, such as primary partitions and logical drives, and these in turn are usually formatted with a file system to become a volume for file storage. Basic disks provide a simple storage solution that can accommodate a useful array of changing storage requirement scenarios. For backward compatibility, basic disks usually use the same Master Boot Record (MBR) partition style as the disks used by the Microsoft MS-DOS operating system and all versions of Windows but can also support GUID Partition Table (GPT) partitions on systems that support it. what is a dynamic disk? Dynamic disks have the ability to create volumes that span multiple disks (spanned and striped volumes) and the ability to create fault-tolerant volumes (mirrored and RAID-5 volumes). Like basic disks, dynamic disks can use the MBR or GPT partition styles on systems that support both. All volumes on dynamic disks are known as dynamic volumes. Dynamic disks offer greater flexibility for vol ume management because they use a database to track information about dynamic volumes on the disk and about other dynamic disks in the computer. Because each dynamic disk in a computer stores a replica of the dynamic disk database, for example, a corrupted dynamic disk database can repair one dynamic disk by using the database on another dynamic disk. Can break spanned volume without lose data? Not possible because spanning (concatenation) exists at a block level rather than a file level, which means that not just a few files, but the entire filesystem, is spanned across the pair of drives. option to "break" the array without losing data would be to clone the spanned volume to a different, single drive then break up the array. Once your array is broken up, you can format the disks into separate volumes again. Now re-clone the backup disk to one of the previous large enough spanned disks. C drive expansons possible? if a partition you are extending has Windows on it, since Windows will treat it as a Boot drive and can't be extended across other disks. There could be only a solution , use a hardware RAID

Expanding drive in windows using disk management

Using commands to doing drive extensions

diskpart >

list partition

list volume

create volume stripe size=1000 disk=1,2

Reffrences

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa363785%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363785%28VS.85%29.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731274.aspx

http://www.support.com/blog/post/resize-your-hard-drive-partition-without-losing-data?geo=IN

http://lifehacker.com/5986883/how-to-combine-multiple-hard-drives-into-one-volume-for-cheap-hig