Question : Dynamic vs Differencing Disks

We are creating a Virtual Desktop Pool in RD Virtualization Host and want to know what kind of disks to use.

Here are the server specs:

Dell R410 with (4) 146GB 15k SCSI drives (RAID 5). There are 2 partitions. The partition that will be hosting the disks has 250GB of free storage remaining.

We have 20 users all together who will need to use the Virtual Desktops, but predict that no more than 10 - 12 users will be logged on at any given time.

So we are thinking of assigning 15GB to each VM running XP SP3. The XP image will only need Office 2007, Adobe Reader, and an in house custom app that takes 1GB of storage space.

Now, knowing our config, what would you do?

Answer : Dynamic vs Differencing Disks

Dynamic drives are the slowest performing VHDs. Because it does allocate the space when it is created. space allocated as need and therefore, extra processor and disk accesses are made to allocate in smaller increments. because it is constantly requesting storage as it grows, dynamic vhd often become quite fragmented. So it has performance impact in terms of rotational latency. It is possible that a file might not be sequentially written on the storage due to the nature of dynamic disk, it may take more time to read it then it would take in a fixed disk.
If performance is not an issue then you can use dynamic disk. Most of time dynamic disk are used for testing and development purposes.

Regards,
Shahid