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The Logical Disk Manager (LDM) is the Microsoft version of a logical volume manager that was first introduced in Windows 2000, and is supported in Windows XP and Windows 7. Microsoft licensed this software from Veritas Software; the two companies then co-developed it further. The logical disk manager’s main purpose is to create and manage dynamic disks.
Dynamic disks are special because they can span multiple physical disk volumes, which allows the disks to be resized dynamically, without the need for rebooting. Unlike basic disks, a dynamic disk volume contains no partitions.
Techopedia Explains Logical Disk Manager
LDM allows for hard partitioning, which is the result of partitioning using the master boot record (MBR) partition table.
Dynamic and basic disks have two fundamental differences:
- Basic disks do not support multipartitioning while dynamic disks do.
- Basic disk partition information is stored in the registry, while for dynamic disks, this is stored on the disk itself.
LDM allows the implementation of the following:
- Volumes spanned across multiple physical disks
- RAID 0 (simple striping)
- RAID 1 (mirrored volumes) for Windows servers only
- RAID 5 (striping with parity) for Windows servers only
