How can 4 hard drives be recognized as 1 big drive?

[JEDI]

i have an old pentium pro 200mhz (overclocked to 225) just lying there. i want to install 4 old hard drives into it (ranges from 4 gig to 10 gig), pop in a network card, and share it to my main system.

main system= WinXP, fat32
Pent Pro will probably be win98. It's not as bloated as WinXP. (unless i need XP)

is there a way to make all 4 drives seem like 1 drive?

And can it show up as a drive letter to my main system?

THX

 

[Shooters]

Disk spanning will do it, but I think it may be a feature only available for NTFS partitioned drives which of course Win98 doesn't support. I might be wrong and it may work with Fat32; hopefully someone can confirm.

 

[wfbberzerker]

i'm not sure you can do it normally, my guess is that you'd have to set up a RAID array using an add-in card.

 

[OverVolt]

If you set up RAID all the drives can only be as big as the smallest drive.

So like if u have a 4Gb, 5Gb, 7Gb, and a 10Gb hard drive. The array will only be 12Gb total since the smallest drive is 4Gb. in RAID0 striping.

You could try the 7Gb+10Gb in RAID0 for 14Gb but thats the most you'll get out of it. then the 5+4Gb in another RAID0 for another 8Gb but they'll show up as two different drives cuz they are different RAID arrays!

Does that make sense? :Q

 

[paralazarguer]

Windows XP drive spanning will do it. I'm not sure if it uses the same principles as RAID 0 for the smallest drive size or not. Anyone out there know?

 

[Vegito]

some card support jbod (just bunch of disk) where it'll create a volume of all drives.. but if 1 drive failes, all data are lost..

 

[zephyrprime]

I'm not sure if it uses the same principles as RAID 0 for the smallest drive size or not. Anyone out there know?

It doesn't work the same way as not like raid 0. Many RAID cards also support spanning. Unix/Linux does too I believe.

 

[SexyK]

Originally posted by: forcesho
some card support jbod (just bunch of disk) where it'll create a volume of all drives.. but if 1 drive failes, all data are lost..

This is exactly right, if you want to do it in hardware you'll need to pick up a RAID card that suports JBOD.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

I think a software called Partition Magic has something to do that...

 

[Gstanfor]

You need to be using windows 2000 or windows xp.
The drives need to be formatted as NTFS

Right click my computer and select manage.
select the disk management icon.

You must then convert the disks you want to combine to dynamic disks (right click the drive {Disk 0 for example} and choose "convert to dynamic disk..." Backup any critical data first, just in case.
repeat for all drives to be combined.
Click on the first drive to be combined then hold ctrl and select the remaining disks also.
Goto the Action menu and select Create spanned volume.

 

[charlie21]

Originally posted by: forcesho
.. but if 1 drive failes, all data are lost..

Now I know that is true for RAID 0, but why JBOD? Why wouldn't the OS be able to salvage the rest of the files on the working disks in the volume? If all or part of a file was on the defective disk, then it is obviously lost. A hard disk can keep working with some bad sectors on it, it just works around the failed part.

 

[Zepper]

Yup,
. JBOD is the way to go. Silicon Image based RAID cards support it for around $20.!
..bh.

 

[Vegito]

ur fat is probably on ur primary drive, so whatever u recover off the rest of the drive is probably non-continuous block of data where it splits.. ie

4 gb + 10 gb + 20 gb = 34 GB

if u have 30 gb data where the split occurs, end of 4 gb to the beginning of 10gb, ur'll lose file there and where the 10 ends and 20 begins

You can probably recover stuff within the 10gb itself but if a file is split between it, u'll lose that one.

 

[NokiaDude]

If you can format the drive to NTFS with the OS of choice then you should be able to turn it into a Dynamic Disk, one partition spanning multiple drives.

 

[Dreadogg]

No offense, but why? Seems like more of a headace than its worth. Not in setting it up but taking it apart, maybe im not seeing the benifit of this, can anyone give some examples of benifits on this type of setup?

 

[LeeTJ]

don't span the disks. install OS on Disk 1. then take Disks 2, 3 and 4 and mount them as Folders on disk 1.

hence Disk 1 = C: , Disk 2 = C:\<folder name>, Disk 3 = C:<folder name>. this way if one disk goes bad it won't impact the others. you don't take the performance hit of Disk spanning and you have everything under C:\

 

[Nemesis77]

If you are willing to give Linux a shot (it's really good as a fileserver), you can do exactly that with LVM (Logical Volume Management).

* Storage aggregation:
Allows multiple block devices to be pulled together and used as a single resource
* Storage virtualization:
Logical block devices can be resized for more efficient use of storage resources; physical block devices can be added or removed from the logical storage pool while the logical block devices are being used
* Snapshots:
Snapshot capability is useful for backing-up data as well as providing fixed points in time for retrieval of lost or discarded data

Have fun

 

[Dreadogg]

Originally posted by: LeeTJ
don't span the disks. install OS on Disk 1. then take Disks 2, 3 and 4 and mount them as Folders on disk 1.

hence Disk 1 = C: , Disk 2 = C:\<folder name>, Disk 3 = C:<folder name>. this way if one disk goes bad it won't impact the others. you don't take the performance hit of Disk spanning and you have everything under C:\

Sorry but I Agree totally thats why I ask the question in above post.

 

[LeeTJ]

Originally posted by: Dreadogg

Originally posted by: LeeTJ
don't span the disks. install OS on Disk 1. then take Disks 2, 3 and 4 and mount them as Folders on disk 1.

hence Disk 1 = C: , Disk 2 = C:\<folder name>, Disk 3 = C:<folder name>. this way if one disk goes bad it won't impact the others. you don't take the performance hit of Disk spanning and you have everything under C:\

Sorry but I Agree totally thats why I ask the question in above post.

i'm not sure why you apologized.

that's how i have my server set up. i just mount my extra HD's as folders. this allows me to use Drive letter. no biggie either way. but sometimes it's annoying switching drives.

it's also nice if you set up 1 HD as c:\Program Files as that is the default for most installation programs. then you do a system backup (w/o including c:\Program files) and if something goes bad w/ your HD just restore the system backup and remount the c:\program files HD and voila your system is as good as new.

 

[thorin]

Isn't that what JBOD mode on raid controllers is meant for?

Thorin

 

[LeeTJ]

Originally posted by: thorin
Isn't that what JBOD mode on raid controllers is meant for?

Thorin

jbod is disk spanning.

what i'm recommending is disk mounting which i think is a safer practice.

 

[JEDI]

Originally posted by: Dreadogg
No offense, but why? Seems like more of a headace than its worth. Not in setting it up but taking it apart, maybe im not seeing the benifit of this, can anyone give some examples of benifits on this type of setup?

my current system has all ide slots full. 1 hd, 1 cd-rw, 1 dvd, 1 zip.

i have spare harddrives (4 to 10 gig in size) and a pent pro 225mhz

i have too much data on my main system to ghost a backup image into the 10 gig. so i need to pool the hd together so i have enuf space