Software raid

[EvanB]

What is the best way, without actually raiding the drives, to have windows see 4 drives as one large drive, just for the purpose of convienence?

Is there some sort of software raid that can be used to achieve such a thing?

Ex:

4 250gb drives (C: J: K: L: )

I want them to appear as one drive to windows and programs run under windows, i.e.:

1 1tb drive (C: )

Thanks in advance!

 

[xtknight]

Yup, it's called dynamic disk in the WinXP computer management->disk management control panel. What you want is a logical volume, not RAID.

 

[Nothinman]

You realize that when (not if) one of those drives dies, you'll lose the entire volume, right?

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
You realize that when (not if) one of those drives dies, you'll lose the entire volume, right?

You will? Even with a logical volume? Won't you just lose the 250GB that drive contributed or is the system not that smart? It doesn't work the same as RAID0 or does it?

 

[EvanB]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
You realize that when (not if) one of those drives dies, you'll lose the entire volume, right?

No, I didn't, so thanks for the info.

I had thought that there was a way to simply make multiple drives appear as one with a software solution of some sort.

Perhaps I'm wrong

 

[Nothinman]

You will? Even with a logical volume? Won't you just lose the 250GB that drive contributed or is the system not that smart? It doesn't work the same as RAID0 or does it?

There are multiple ways to do it, but the dangers are pratically the same for all of them. There are some other variables, I think Windows supports a linear volume which just extends the filesystem across all of the drives. But I would assume it still wouldn't be good to lose one since I doubt Windows would replicate the MFT to each drive since it considers them all one big volume. FAT would be even worse since the main FAT and the backup are both at the beginning. With a linear volume it would probably be easier to salvage the data since the breaks will be cleaner since the data won't be striped across all of the drives.

I had thought that there was a way to simply make multiple drives appear as one with a software solution of some sort.

There is, but with that ability comes the danger of losing the entire volume if one drive dies and IDE drives are built really cheaply so the chances of one of four drives dying is pretty good IMO.

 

[kamper]

Hmmm? Can't you just mount ntfs partitions to folders on other ntfs partitions? That shouldn't result in total loss with one failure. You'd have three subfolders, limited to 250GB, but it should work.

 

[Nothinman]

Yes, you can. But it's not what he wants and the space will still be confined to that one filesystem whether it's mounted to a drive letter or a directory.