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Display Name (?):

Logical Disk Manager

Short Name (?):

dmserver

Executable (?):

svchost.exe

Library (?):

dmserver.dll

Depends On (?):

Remote Procedure Call (RPC), Plug and Play

Supports (?):

Logical Disk Manager Administrative Service

Description (?):

Detects and monitors new hard disk drives and sends disk volume information to Logical Disk Manager Administrative Service for configuration. If this service is stopped, dynamic disk status and configuration information may become out of date. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start.

OS (?):

2000 Professional, XP Home/Professional, Vista Home/Business, 2000 Server, Server 2003, Vista Server

Startup (?):

Default	Home	Workstation	Server	Minimal	Tweaked	Automatic
Automatic	Automatic	Automatic	Automatic	Manual	Disabled	Disabled

Explanation (?):

The logical disk manager service is used in detecting hot swapable hard-drives. This means that any drive you add or remove while the computer is on will be detected by this service. A word of caution though. Do not remove a hard-drive when the computer is on unless the drive is designed for it as you may damage it or some other component of your computer. Generally speaking your hard-drives are not hot swappable unless on a server with zero fault tolerance or with new SATA drives that properly follow the specifications for them. This service is also used as a go between for the logical disk manager administrative service so anything that uses that service depends on this service. An example of that would be the Computer Managment MMC snap-in for formatting your disks, partitioning your disks, dynamic disk conversion, drive fault tolerant recovery and even altering your page file.

If you're curious a dynamic disk is a specially configured drive that has been assigned to the logical disk manager. The usefulness of of a dynamic disk is that it allows you to expand the size of a disk if not all the free space of a drive is used up and it is claimed to be faster than a 'static' disk. The downside of this feature is that once altered to a dynamic disk a hard-drive cannot be reverted without wiping it, you cannot upgrade to other operating systems with it, you cannot install other operating systems on the drive, the drive must be manually mounted if used in another computer and any disk imaging utility (like Drive Image or Ghost) may have issues duplicating it.

Generally speaking this service should be left at automatic. If you set this service to manual it will most likely be started upon boot. However, disabling this service will save you some resources. If you disable this service and find anything not working properly with your hard-drives then just set this service back to normal. If you have any drives set to dynamic be sure not to disable this service.