Spanning without using Raid
Hi again 
Seeing as my last question was answered so fast i decided to ask another..
I have quite a few hard disks but i find it annoying having to find stuff spread across all my drives.
What i want is to be able to make it appear in windows as if they are all one drive in explorer. but all data is stored seperately on each drive. So if 1 drive did fail i wouldn't lose data from all drives like if i used striping. I can't afford a raid 5 controller with atleast 8 ports right now..
Is there any way i can achieve this? i though JBOD did this but after reading about it, it seems it would be like striping but with no advantages and still risk losing data on other drives..
It may not be possible in windows, i might have to convert to linux :/ but if anybody knows of a way for windows please let me know!
Seeing as my last question was answered so fast i decided to ask another..
I have quite a few hard disks but i find it annoying having to find stuff spread across all my drives.
What i want is to be able to make it appear in windows as if they are all one drive in explorer. but all data is stored seperately on each drive. So if 1 drive did fail i wouldn't lose data from all drives like if i used striping. I can't afford a raid 5 controller with atleast 8 ports right now..
Is there any way i can achieve this? i though JBOD did this but after reading about it, it seems it would be like striping but with no advantages and still risk losing data on other drives..
It may not be possible in windows, i might have to convert to linux :/ but if anybody knows of a way for windows please let me know!
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Comments
I divide drives into smaller sections. I keep things that are related on each partition do that ai don't have to look eveywhere.
Your making it harder then it is I think.
Tex
You are corect sir!
Thats classicaly what directorys are for also. Why have a seperate partition for "downloads" or "music" or "movies" or "programs" versus a directory?
There is no advantage for "looking for stuff". The advantage of just using a partition versus directorys is any one directory can grow larger on the fly then you originaly envisoned for it when you created the set size for that partition.
When you suddenly fill up your MP3 or MOVIE parttiton its a hassle to resize them. Much more so for nomal users then you also. And I have had it barf in the middle of resizing a partition to the result that if I didnt have terrabytes of space to of backed it up to first it would of been deadly for most users.
I was lucky. Well not lucky I was smart and well prepared just in case.
But for the average ( I said AVERAGE) user one OS partition and then one big space to create directorys in is the best way to go.
Tex
Tex
got a 300gb today to backup stuff for moving raid and took ages to format even 2% and turned out the drive was full of bad sectors.. talk about bad luck!
anyway thanks peepz.
Is that a brand new 300gb that has bad sectors? If so, I'd return that thing and have them give you one that doesn't come pre-borked. I can break hard drives without any help from the manufacturer, thank you
Win XP needs sp2 to see that drive correctly. What were you using to format? I mean what OS? You mentioned Linux above is why I ask.
And what MB and bios are you using also?
tex
how does one do this?
You need free space on MULTIPLE partitons on MULTIPLE dynamic drives.
Tex
this one is fine. and i was using normal windows gui format. also i scanned it with seatools.
Question 1: about dynamic disks, the spanning feature does that keep each drives data completly seperate? or will it use ever last bit of space and then continue a file on the next h/d?
Question 2: Anybody had failures with nforce 4 raid? i've heard some bad story's. i haven't had any probs with silicon image 3114 on old mobo. But i make sure i use same brand and model number hard disks to minimise differences, so that might be why. I can't say i've ever had one of my h/ds die ever. not in the 22 yrs i have been dealing with comps since i was 2
2) No experiance with nforce4 raid. But I have been in this buisness now 24 years. The first IBM PC's were introduced in 1983/1984. You were a lucky 2 year old to of had one. They had no hard drive btw..... Were floppy based and cost thousands of dollars. The first 10mb hard drives in them came later and cost a grand. And yes that was MB not GB. In the late 80's we were buying 80mb seagates for $800 and I thought we would never ever fill one of those babies up. Times change.
I have seen hundreds of hard drives fail. Many just days or weeks old. Trust me it has nothing to do with copying two things at once either... Not sure why you feel thats so much more stressful then copying one thing at a time. The heads still only move back and forth at the same rate of speed from one spot to another. Depending on where on the disk the fragments of the single file are you could be jerking the heads all over the platters copying a single file. Or just reading normal files etc..
Tex
And yeah my first comp.. although maybe considered a console was the good old BBC, with a audio casette tape drive. fun playing original Elite
and then up through the ranks so that i now have 2x3ghz machines, 1xintel and 1xamd. but the old days were definitely the best
I was a bit worried that i would lose data doing this, so i had to again backup data to make a test drive. But it worked without any data loss.. So i'm all happy. 2.35tb of h/d goodness