Windows 7 Spanned Volumes and hot-swapping

[boren]

I'd like to use my drives (two USB + two SATA) as a single logical partition. I also want to be able to disconnect any given disk from the array, without the entire array failing. As far as I understand the dynamic spanned volume feature of Windows 7 doesn't support this. Are there any ways to work around this limitation (preferably via Windows itself or a free application)? Is it any different in Linux?

Thanks!

 

[VirtualLarry]

If it's spanning a single volume (filesystem) across all four disks, then there is no way to remove one of those disks, and still have an operable filesystem.

What you need, is something that stores an individual filesystem on each disk, but virtualizes that to programs and users, to appear as if it were only a single filesystem.

I am not aware of a way to do this easily, although WHS v1 does something similar. I have heard of Amahi and GreyHole on Linux, although I'm not sure exactly what they do.

 

[Virucyde]

Your actual request isn't theoretically possible, should the drives truly be spanned, pulling any single drive would essentially pull whatever data is on that drive from your system, some sort of data duplication must occur in order to achieve a sort of hot swappable array.

Assuming the drives you're trying to connect are the same size, it seems like your best bet would be splitting your spans across two drives, then mirroring them. So your USB disks could be spanned, and your internal drives would also be spanned, then you'd mirror the two, allowing you to pull both USB drives and basically have them as a backup.

Not exactly what you're looking for, and you'd get half the space, but it seems like the closest thing to what you asked. :/