Hard disk is important part of any computer System and managing this disk most be done with proper knowledge on disk management. You have to be familiar with different terminology before you start playing with your disk management console. Here at ComputerAnthem we have put together some of the most important terms and concepts

• Volume A volume is a disk or subdivision of a disk that is formatted and available for storage. If a volume is assigned a drive letter, it appears
  as a separate entity in Windows Explorer. A hard disk can have one, several, or many volumes.
• Simple volume A simple volume is a dynamic volume that is made up of disk space from a single dynamic disk. On a basic disk, a simple volume is also known as a partition.
• Spanned volume A spanned volume is a volume that uses more than one physical disk, making the combination appear and function as
  though it were a single storage medium.You can use any unallocated space left on disks to create a spanned volume.
• Striped volume A striped volume is a volume in which data is stored in 64-KB strips across physically separate disks to improve performance.
  Data in a striped volume is allocated alternately and evenly (in stripes) across the disks. Striped volumes offer the best performance of all the volumes that are available in Windows, but they do not provide fault tolerance.
• Basic disk A basic disk can be subdivided into as many as four partitions. (Disks that have been initialized using a GUID Partition Table can have more than four.) All volumes on a basic disk must be simple volumes. When you use Disk Management to create new simple volumes, the first three partitions it creates are primary partitions. The fourth is created as an extended partition sing all remaining unallocated space on the disk. An extended partition an be organized into as many as 2000 logical disks. In use, a logical disk behaves exactly like a primary partition.
• Dynamic disk A dynamic disk offers organizational options not available on a basic disk. In addition to simple volumes, dynamic disks can contain spanned or striped volumes. These last two volume types combine space from multiple disks.
• Mounted drive A mounted drive is a volume that is mapped to an empty folder on an NTFS-formatted disk. Mounted drives function the same as any other drive, but are assigned a label or name instead of a drive letter. The mounted drive’s name is resolved to a full file system path instead of just a drive letter.
• File system A file system is a method for organizing folders (directories) and files on a storage medium. Windows 7 supports the following file systems: FAT (File Allocation Table), NTFS (NT File System), CDFS (Compact Disc File System, also sometimes identified as ISO-9660), and UDF (Universal Disk Format).
• Active Partition The active partition is the one from which an x86-based computer starts after you power it up. The first physical hard disk attached to the system (Disk 0) must include an active partition.
• Boot partition The boot partition is the partition where the Windows system files are located.
• System partition The system partition is the partition that contains the bootstrap files that Windows uses to start your system and display the boot menu.
• MBR and GPT disks MBR (master boot record) and GPT (GUID Partition Table) are terms describing alternative methods for maintaining the information regarding a disk’s subdivisions. GPT disks support larger volumes (up to 18 exabytes) and more partitions (as many as 128 on a basic disk). You can convert a disk from MBR to GPT (or vice versa) only before a disk has been partitioned for the first time (or after all partitions have been removed).