Merging harddrives to geather?

[Skuggomann]

Dont have a clue if this is hardwere or softwere related so:


I have some hard drives and there beginnign to cluster upp and i was wondering, can't i just smash them all to geather into "one" drive?

i have:

2x300gb
2x250gb
1x200gb
and im thinking of getttign 2x 750gb
also have 2x500gb external

but ennywys found this thing called JBOD, enny one know how it works?

or shud i sell the small dirves and get 3x 750 sATA and have them raid 0 or 1 or 5 or 10?




im scraching my head over this one, enny one see the light?

[Ishar]

JBOD sounds just like spanning....Didn't I see an option in disk manager in vista to do this, or something very similar.

I'm in much the same situation...uh. lets see

internaL:
1 160gb
1 250gb
1 320gb
1 500gb
external:
2 500gb
2 250gb
1 320gb

its...horrible. horrible. (having so many hard drives on one machine, i mean)

Not 100% sure I would try JBOD/spanning over externals....sorta defeats the purpose of externals (portability) since since you wouldn't know for sure what was actually stored on that disk. Also, I tend to shift important things onto newer disks. and JBOD/spanning isn't gonna help ya with fault tolerance. If something goes bad, its a wash what ya lose =0.

I'm thinking of buying 4 or so 750 or 1 tb hard drives and doing raid 10, 0+1, or 5...but I'm lazy. But I have all this money invested in hardware..and none invested in protecting my data. Haven't made a decision yet tho. Kinda a big investment. and still smarting from the whole rack thing. Maybe i'll wait till I start to run out of space, and then replace my assortment with a raid array =0.

I've never done raid tho, or spanning, mind you. So my knowledge is all theory/dealing with what other people have done =0. Raid 5 is very tempting on paper... but seems unpopular.

Wikipedia has a decent overview of raid if you don't know anything about it.

The one guy i know IRL that bothes with a raid (raid 0) is tired of it and is thinking about abandoning it.

[Binaryzero]

JBOD stands for Just a Bunch of Disks. The controller treats each drive as a stand-alone disk, therefore each drive is an independent logical drive. JBOD does not provide data redundancy.

I have one machine that I use that is running Raid 0 (or JBOD) and the drive access benchmarks faster then it they were standalong. BUT as I have said already, there is no redundancy so if one drive fails, you lose 100% of your data.

[Sarduci]

The above definition of JBOD is correct. It's commonly used in low end disk enclosures that do not come with a RAID controller or hook into a unit with a RAID controller built into it (i.e. SAN/NAS/DAS) Spanning RAID over multiple JBODs increases failure risk by a stupid large amount by more than just single disk failure for RAID0.

An extra PCI disk drive controller in you computer is like a JBOD in your system.

RAID5 is slower than RAID0 or RAID1 for what you want generally unless you use 4 or more drives for the RAID setup. Most home systems only support 4 drives, so you really can't have a RAID5 for you OS and a RAID0 for your games since it's 5 drives to do. (technically a single drive is a RAID0 but there is none of the RAID0 advantages with it)

Edit: JBOD is independent of anything to do with RAID. They just show up as single drives to your OS.

[Sarduci]

JBOD sounds just like spanning....Didn't I see an option in disk manager in vista to do this, or something very similar.

<SNIP>

The one guy i know IRL that bothes with a raid (raid 0) is tired of it and is thinking about abandoning it.

There's nothing special about it. Insert a drive with a capacity greater than the amount of data on the drives. Use a disk imaging program to move everything over to the new drives. 20 minutes worth of work at the most.

[Binaryzero]

JBOD sounds just like spanning....Didn't I see an option in disk manager in vista to do this, or something very similar.

<SNIP>

The one guy i know IRL that bothes with a raid (raid 0) is tired of it and is thinking about abandoning it.

There's nothing special about it. Insert a drive with a capacity greater than the amount of data on the drives. Use a disk imaging program to move everything over to the new drives. 20 minutes worth of work at the most.

That is drive cloning via an app like Ghost, we are talking about harware/software Raid.

[Sarduci]

JBOD sounds just like spanning....Didn't I see an option in disk manager in vista to do this, or something very similar.

<SNIP>

The one guy i know IRL that bothes with a raid (raid 0) is tired of it and is thinking about abandoning it.

There's nothing special about it. Insert a drive with a capacity greater than the amount of data on the drives. Use a disk imaging program to move everything over to the new drives. 20 minutes worth of work at the most.

That is drive cloning via an app like Ghost, we are talking about harware/software Raid.

That was in reply to getting rid of a RAID0, especially if it contains your bootloader for your OS(s).