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.