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Disks, partitions, volumes & file systems (as far as it concerns Microsoft's Operating Systems)

• MS-DOS up to v... does not support any partition tables
• MS-DOS up to v... does not support extended partitions / partition tables
• standard MS-DOS disks are basic disks with MBR and a max of 4 primary partitions
• disks can be basic or dynamic
• dynamic disks (partition type 0x42?) can (under Windows) only be converted back to basic if there are no partitions on them
• partition tables can be MBR or GPT (type 0xEE?, Win2003 w/ SP1 onwards)
• MBR stands for Master Boot Record, and allows up to 4 primary partitions as well as (chained) extended partitions; max size is 2TB
• GPT stands for GUID Partition Table, and allows up to 128 partitions per disk and volumes up to 18 exabytes
• RAID-0 with spanning is also/better known as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) and is no RAID as in the sense of the letter R (redundant)!
• RAID levels with redundancy are available in Windows Server only
• combination of stripe and mirror (RAID-01 or RAID-10) is not possible
• other combinations (like RAID-50) aren't possible either
• RAID-6 is not supported (yet?)
• (legacy) RAID levels 2, 3, 4 or others than mentioned here aren't supported either
• RAID-1 supports two disks only
• striping, mirroring and RAID-5 cannot be extended to more disks after creation
• hot spares are not supported by any RAID level
• partition types 0x86 and 0x87 seem to be used in Windows NT 4.0 (for software-RAID?), but seem only roughly supported by any following Windows-version, and completely unsupported from Windows Server 2003 onwards
• partitions/volumes without a drive letter cannot be formatted (bug?)
• in contrast to some other operating systems (including MS-DOS and Windows v4.x), Windows NT does not distinguish partitions based on their filesystem
• volumes can contain system data: boot, crash dump, page file, system
• supported filesystems: FAT12, FAT16 (MS-DOS v4.0 onwards), FAT32 (Windows v4.0 onwards), exFAT (Windows v6.0 / Vista SP1 onwards?), NTFS (v4?) (Windows NT onwards), NTFS v5 (Windows v5.1 / XP onwards), HPFS (NT v3.x only?), ReFS (v6.? onwards)
• FAT32 bigger than 32GB is not formatable with Windows v5.0 onwards, but can be read. This is by design (Microsoft wants you to use NTFS or one of the newer filesystems instead)! FAT32 itself supports up to 16 TB/TiB (depending on sector/cluster size).
• FAT is not supported while creating any RAID level, regardless of the volume's size; but can be used for formatting afterwards
• untested: how do the OS's cope with any sector size other than 512 Byte?
• Depending upon their configuration (by their manufacturer), USB mass storage devices ("memory sticks") may or may not contain a partition table. Although this may be changeable using Linux or alike, it's not possible with Windows' on-board-tools. Weird behaviour may occur if you try nevertheless.
• Creating extended partitions in Windows v5 and deleting them with v6 (or vice versa) has sometimes reproducably produces massive data loss (more than the selected partition was deleted). Without deeper investigation, this seems to correlate with cylinder-aligned addressing in Win up to v5 versus LBA-oriented addressing in v6 onwards?
• further changes occur if the disk has a logical sector size != 512 Byte. All versions of MS-DOS and Windows versions prior to v6.? will fail or show strange behaviour with such disks. Newer versions of Windows will try to align partitions accordingly.
• Windows sometimes uses the term "simple volume" for primary partitions on MBR/GPT, logical drives on MBR, and for simple volumes on dynamic disks as well

color type RAID level availability actions comments unallocated N/A all create new ... this is empty disk space, or a partition table / logical disk Windows can't cope with primary partition N/A MBR & GPT up to 4 on an MBR-disk, up to 128 on a GPT-disk extended partition N/A MBR only 1 per drive, contains logical drives free space N/A MBR only? new volume inside an extended partition only? logical drive N/A MBR inside an extended partition only simple volume N/A dynamic add mirror, extend volume spanned volume RAID-0 (JBOD) dynamic extend volume striped volume RAID-0 dynamic mirrored volume RAID-1 dynamic remove mirror, break mirror available only in Windows Server RAID-5 volume RAID-5 dynamic available only in Windows Server