JBOD and data integrity

[Decius]

I have a 250GB and a 500GB SATA drive in one of my systems, and would like them in one big chunk of storage space. Naturally this would lead me to JBOD. One thing I'm curious about with that spec is data integrity.

If one of the drives fail does it affect data across the entire JBOD array, or just the data on the dead drive? Would an overly large file sitting at the end of one disk be spanned to the second, and if so would that file be lost?

Thanks

 

[Roguestar]

If one fails, you only lose what was on that drive, much like if you have a partition on a large drive, and deleted it, you'd not lose what was left on the other partitions. There is no data redundancy with JBOD. An overly large file, as you say, would indeed likely be spanned across to the next disc and would be affected if one drive died.

 

[Decius]

wunderbar, thanks

 

[RebateMonger]

Note that if you use WINDOWS SOFTWARE SPANNING, which is similar to JBOD in what it does, you'll lose the content of ALL drives in the array if a single drive fails. At least, there are no built-in Windows tools to recover the files.

I've never used hardware-based JBOD, and I don't know how it responds to a drive failure.

 

[zig3695]

ive tried seemingly everything you can to tie multiple disks to one drive letter, and i always end up going back to a few large drives on their own letters as a regular drives. there is nothing convenient about losing data and i find just about anything you can do to preserve that data is worth the effort.